BT Signpost points to the future

Companies are still suspicious of employees interacting with social networking sites during office hours. The concern is that staff might spend too much time staying in touch with friends instead of concentrating on their day job. And yet in the right hands, social networking technology can be a powerful aid for business. BT Global Services is so convinced it has developed a new collaborative tool that is already delivering benefits...

It’s a problem faced by every large, global organisation - how on earth do you manage knowledge efficiently and effectively? After all, each day organisations create and store a colossal amount of information. At the same time, knowledge and expertise is being accrued by staff in different parts of the organisation that could be shared across the business.

In the past, gaining access to this information was largely down to pot luck. Finding out what colleagues were up to might have down to a chance meeting or word of mouth. But BT Global Services has developed a tool which intelligently 'joins the dots' between enterprise data repositories and people within the organisation. Instead of a ‘hit and miss’ approach, the technology is able to make connections that are not obviously apparent.

Called Signpost, it has the ability to allow people to find, communicate, collaborate and keep in touch. In a pilot earlier this year the Signpost system demonstrated that it could intelligently make associations between people's skills, their professional CVs, documents they had written or reviewed – as well as other information such as job role and title.

The beauty of Signpost is that makes these connections by plugging into existing systems, databases and document repositories with minimum input from users. In fact, it works much like a search engine. Users simply tap in what they’re looking for, and then they’re presented with a shortlist of matches. They then have the option to refine the results based on various criteria such as whether someone has a particular technical discipline or where they are based.

Collaborative environment

Once the right person is found, Signpost then provides all the necessary contact details such as e-mail, phone or instant messenger to ensure that people can make contact – something that is critical in supporting a collaborative working environment. That’s because this type of Enterprise Social Networking encourages peer, interest group and team networking, and ensures that colleagues keep in touch to share experiences in the future.

"Signpost allows users to identify knowledge and expertise within the organisation by providing the ability to search for people by topic,” said Matt Reeves, a member of Signpost’s Development Team responsible for rolling out the technology.

“Signpost makes intelligent associations between people’s skills, presents the information in a friendly easy-to-understand way and then let’s them get in touch with one another.

“It also includes the ability to offer similar search results for customer information, Processes & Methods, BT's capability and News stories for employees to ensure that they are able to find the right information at the right time to better serve their customers,” he said.

The pilot phase of Signpost has proved so successful it is due to be made available to Global Service’s entire 36,000 workforce by early next year. What’s more, BT Global Services customers are beginning to show an interest in the technology.

In June this year BT Global Services chief executive Francois Barrault met senior representatives from BT’s top customers at an annual Customer Partnership Council (CPC) meeting in Beijing. The event gave customers the chance to question BT about its strategy, and understand trends and developments in networked IT services. And one of the key areas of discussion focused on using social networking to enhance corporate creativity and flexibility.

Well received

Andrew Falkingbridge, who works alongside Matt at BT Global Services, said that BT's ‘Converged Knowledge Management’ capability was well received by those who attended the event.

“We’ve already seen great interest being expressed from a number of our key customers who are facing similar business problems,” said Andrew.

“At BT Global Services we’re now looking at how our established capabilities in developing knowledge management based solutions can be applied to an external market place.”

Which suggests that businesses are warming to the idea of social networking technology in the workplace. But only as long as it can be used to help organisations make the most out of their knowledge and people.