Lessons Learned from Implementing Social Bookmarking at Océ

This is the fifth in a series of interviews with Samuel Driessen, Information Architect at Océ and some of his colleagues, about their Enterprise 2.0 implementation and adoption experiences. Océ is a leading international provider of digital document management technology and services. Earlier, I wrote out their micro-messaging (Yammer) , wiki experiences, enterprise information architecture, and SharePoint implementation. For this post I spoke with Samuel and Peter Kruizinga about their social bookmarking experiences.

Peter and a colleague set up the social bookmarking application in the Research and Development department using an Open Source tool. Peter is a member of R&D and part of their job is doing research on current trends in various technical issues. People were sharing links to web articles through email. However, they would only send them to a few close colleagues so as to not “spam” others. The information was not getting fully distributed to the right people. It was hard to decide what to send to whom.

Peter wanted a better way to share important links connected with their research so he set up the social bookmarking application. This provided a non-intrusive way to make these links available and placed the responsibility to accessing them wit the individual. Several people had used public social bookmarking tools such as del.icio.us but they needed a way to share information behind the firewall. Peter said they did not want to give away their areas of focus to competitors.

It started slow with only a few contributors. However, there were many more readers so information was getting shared and the experiment is accomplishing its objectives. There are now plans to both promote the system and extend its functionality.

There have been some notable success stories that Peter and Samuel intend to use as part of the promotion. For example, one R&D project had both Peter and Samuel as part of the team. The other team members had not yet used the social bookmarking tool. They were amazed with how information could be easily shared with the tool and new information that could be discovered. Peter found a number of prior bookmarks on their topic so they had a very good history of the issue with very little effort.

In another example, Peter and Samuel are following different topics on the Web and then sharing each other’s findings. This way they act as a filter to portions of the Web, saving each other time.

They have a number of ideas on how to expand the social bookmarking capability. First, they would like to integrate a trend-overview application based on bookmarks so they can look at what people are interested in over time. They also wanted to establish an offline cache to periodically fetch the bookmarked web pages and documents and place them in local storage. This prevents dead link problems and lost information for older bookmarks.

In addition, they want to offer the possibility to bookmark offline content such as files that were sent by email or any other files for which there is no URL. They want the possibility to search on tags, as well as on combinations of tags or words. They also want the ability to find experts for a specific tag (who submitted bookmarks with that tag). Finding the top three taggers on a topic can be a useful starting place.

We discussed both the integration and the differentiation of the bookmarking tool and other enterprise 2.0 tools. They can now bookmark pages in the enterprise wiki, as well as the memo filing system. They also plan to integrate it with the file sharing system. They will cross-promote the different enterprise 2.0 tools within each one and provide guidance on when to use each.

R&D is an ideal place to start using a social bookmarking tool because of its heavy research of the Web. They now plan to spread its use into the broader corporation. This will enable everyone to better stay current with their areas.

Comments

[Sunny]

Thanks for the Post.

Our team have been using social bookmarking as well and found it to be a good way to share information and filtering relevant content to our work.

We make use of tag subscription and reading the RSS feeds into an enterprise wiki so that bookmarks are directed to different workspace depending on the nature of the bookmarks.

[bill Ives]

Sunny - Thanks for the comment and good idea. Bill

[ReputationManagementConsultants.com]

Great stuff. Thanks for sharing.