SOCIAL SOFTWARE BEHIND THE FIREWALL: IN THE WORKPLACE

In an environment where the pace of work is ever increasing and less time is available away from the task, new means are needed to allow staff to access and share expertise. It’s perhaps not surprising to read that technology companies like Microsoft or Yahoo are using blogs and wikis on their intranets to support support staff training and development. However, when the Financial Times (FT) reports that Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein (DrKW), the investment bank, “…is also a believer in the brave new world of wikis and blogs” you know that something is happening. J.P. Rangaswami, Chief Information Officer at DrKW, states that “We recognised early on that these tools would allow us to collaborate more effectively than existing technologies…More than 450 DrKW employees have internal blogs and the bank has built an internal wiki with more than 2,000 pages which is used by a quarter of its workforce. After just six months, the traffic on the wiki exceeds that on the entire DrKW intranet.” (Nairn, 2006)

At a recent Learning Technologies conference held in London in January 2006, Gareth Jones (Head of Strategy and Operations, BBC Training & Development) eloquently described the difficulties experienced by the BBC in developing its least experienced staff. Senior, experienced staff have less time available to pass on their knowledge and expertise via traditional means (e.g. leading training etc.) so the Corporation established wikis and blogs on their internal network where experienced staff in various disciplines are encouraged to record their knowledge, which can then be edited & updated (via their web browser) as technology or practices change.

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