I am repeating a post I did on the FastForward blog as I think this is an interesting tool. Last week I talked with Julia Grinham, Commercial Director at Cogenz. Cogenz is a UK based enterprise social bookmarking tool. Julia said they launched in April, and have subsequently signed up over 30 clients. BUPA, Pfizer, Bank of England and GSK are testing out the product. I have actually worked with the first three so I was very interested in the applications. They are currently scoping out a Server Installed version of Cogenz to meet client requirements for a ‘behind the firewall’ solution and they are also developing a full API to allow totally flexible integration. These are two smart moves. You can also import del.icio.us tags into Cognez, and simultaneously post tags to both Cogenz and del.icio.us if required. In addition, users can subscribe to updates on their favorite tags or authors.
I had heard of Cogenz before through this blog and was pleased to learn they have launched as I think there is a strong use for enterprise social bookmarking tools. Last year I wrote, Intranet Social Bookmarking: Playing Tag Behind the Firewall for Intranets Today, where I discussed some business applications, and more recently added a post on this blog on what del.icio.us needs to do (to be more useful to business).
Cogenz positions itself to enable three components of collaboration, as listed on their site: Collect: Save links to interesting internet and intranet pages and access them from anywhere; Collaborate; Share bookmarks privately with others in your organization; Connect: Easily find useful links and topics, and relevant experts in your company. I remember reading earlier about how they positioned themselves, in part, as an expert locator. They have a Cogenz blog for updates.
At this point what interests me most are actual use cases. One pilot that has gone far enough to report results is BUPA, a global health and care organization with over 40,000 employees operating in 192 countries. It is centered in the UK and that part is what I am familiar with as I did consulting work for them around knowledge management in 1995 while living in London. They seem to an early adopter.
BUPA has been running a Cogenz trial for 6 months with 50 users from Head Office. The business objective is to develop a shared library of information resources and make better use of the collective intelligence of the workforce. Cogenz has been rolled out across several Head Office Divisions: Group Strategy & Development; Group Marketing; Market Research; Group Medical; Health Informatics; BUPA International; Corporate Communications.
So far about 10% of users contribute to Cogenz, with the remainder of users are actively browsing the content. They are also planning to feed users’ content tags into the BUPA Autonomy search engine to improve automatic indexing of content and analyze tag patterns as a source of information about intellectual capital within the organization
BUPA is now looking at a broader enterprise 2.0 strategy that includes social bookmarking. As part of this strategy they are looking at how Cogenz can be used to categorize and search information on their corporate intranet, integrated through the Cognez API.
Social bookmarking should be one of the easier Enterprise 2.0 tools to implement on the enterprise level since it doesn’t require a major shift in user behavior, If they are not del.icio.us users, and most will not be, people are very familiar with the concept of bookmarking useful web pages in their desktop. Now you improve on this feature by making it easier to find things they have bookmarked before, even when they’re away from their own computer.
Most, if not all, readers of this blog are familiar with social bookmarking so no need to explain it further. I like it as it provides some of the essence of Enterprise 2.0 by making search a social activity that can bring people together who have common interests. What will be interesting over time is to see if this potential value can be realized and firms actually obtain a better understanding of the overall collective intelligence of the organization, and the networks that exist between its employees. This is what the BUPA pilot is trying to understand, among other things. They have formed a monthly steering committee to monitor results.
To get the pilot off to a right start, they have pre-populate the system with usable content. They plan to provide no governance so that natural usage patterns can emerge. They will supply both top down and bottom up support and are marketing the system and it’s benefits to the organization. 
enterprise 2.0 
enterprise tagging 
web 2.0 
enterprise social media
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