Here is a link to an interesting article this week from CIO Insight, about social networking in the enterprise. It highlights Wachovia’s current initiative to deploy an enterprise-wide social network, and the rationale for doing so. Here is an excerpt:

Wachovia plans to introduce its social networking service to its 110,000 workers by early 2008. Like the popular Facebook service, the network will allow users to upload photos of themselvesnot just corporate ID mug-shots, eitherand personal information. Community-building across the vast company is one of the goals.

This initiative gets at the heart of an internal effort at BSG Alliance as well - that of the “Personal Tag Cloud”. Think of the PTC as a representation of a person’s skills, abilities, interests and past projects for starters. The big tags are where the interest or strength or experience is the greatest. A social network and collaborative focus, in addition to the right On Demand applications, allows this to happen. Some more excerpts related to the PTC concept and the benefits of this type of social networking:

The idea is that it will boost top and bottom lines by providing a clear understanding of who knows what, and who knows whom, within a company and among its business partners. Making it easy for people to get together online and off, and harnessing the energy and information unleashed in recent years by so-called Web 2.0 tools, is supposed to advance core business tasks including sales, marketing and knowledge management.

To my BSG colleagues, it’s interesting to note the industries which have focus on using collaborative social networks for getting work done:

Early adopters range from the U.S. intelligence community, which plans to launch a cross-agency social network in December, to major players in the pharmaceutical industry, where drug discovery is being driven by knowledge-sharing across companies

^ brian