Blog and Wiki Success Story from Traction Software - UK’s National Health Service (NHS) Orkney

Here is another cross post from the FASTForward blog as I am continuing to speak with providers in our space. I have talked with Jordan Frank, Traction Software’s Vice President for Marketing and Business Development, on numerous occasions over the last several years and feel that they have a very robust solution for the enterprise. Tractions’s Team Page was named the best enterprise wiki for 2007 by Infoworld. Many people are asking for Enterprise 2.0 success stories. Here is a useful example of how organizations are using web 2.0 tools within the organization. I will provide another in my next post.

The UK’s National Health Service (NHS) Orkney branch in Scotland was tangled up in email to the point that it was strangling their internal communications. Inboxes got filled up with extraneous messages on too many topics, large attachments clogged downloads, version control went out the window as attachments crossed in cyberspace, and the problem of dumping everything in everyone’s inbox made effective communication difficult. They had a portal but it was hard to use and requited technical support. An internal audit criticized how communication was handled, and IT had to act.

This is a common problem for which Enterprise 2.0 platforms provide great solutions that are practical to implement and often lend to greater success than typical portal and collaboration solutions. In this case the NHS Orkney implemented Traction TeamPage (insert a link), a hybrid blog and wiki platform built for enterprise groups. It bridged the best of both email and the portal without the pitfalls. Blogs off loaded much traffic from email into a more organized, accessible and time ordered platform for communication and collaboration. It combined the ease of email with the organization and control that the portal was supposed to provide. Tags on blog posts helped with organization and accessibility.

Content could now be parsed to appropriate channels giving employees control over what they accessed. NHS Orkney organized their blog platform’s Front Page to roll up activity in 4 sections: Clinical, Organization, Classified and Personals, and Recent News and Information (a catch all). The source content may be posted to any of 11 projects visible to all employees, or from additional projects that require permission for those who need to know. The projects covered range from Clinical Services to HR, IT and Personals.

There are newspages with their own content sections for each of the project groups. For example, on the IT Newspage you can see a content section with important notices such as new password reset policy information and new information about a fix to a Blackberry RIM issue, together with a list of all recent articles and comments. Sections are also used at this project space level to display wiki type content, like policies or FAQs, that are edited over time to keep it up to date.

You can also see the labels used within the IT Newspage, with an indication of frequency for each. Depending on your interest, you may click on a label to see its content, or you may even drill down iteratively to see pages with any combination of labels.

NewsGator Enterprise Server is integrated with the Traction TeamPage platform to allow employees to subscribe to internal feeds from Traction. Feeds for the most important tags or tag collections in Traction are provided by default. The IT people set the default feeds in Newsgator which means everyone’s Newsgator feeds will include these plus any additional ones that a given user wants for themselves. Employees can then create their own feed based on any search. In this way, incoming information gets filtered and differentiated in a manner that each individual (controls? I am tripping on “sets up before they see it”) sets up before they see it, making information management easier.

Since the blog and wiki system has been implemented, "corporate spam" has dropped substantially and they are getting ready to turn off "all-staff" and other large group mailing lists. They system is being used for collaborative work efforts and the range of information on the blog continues to expand. I especially liked to see that the NHS Orkney staff hope that the Enterprise 2.0 technology will “encourage a change towards more openness and collaboration, a change expanding communication circles from need to know to can know, (I think italics on the need to know/can know phrases work better) a change we believe would benefit the NHS.” I guess they side with Andrew McAfee here.

I am very pleased to see these success stories emerge, Aspects of it remind me of the work that Al Essa, former CIO at MIT Sloan, did when he implemented blogs as the cross project communication platform in his IT department. In this case silos were removed so everyone could now see what others were doing and learn from their efforts. I wrote about his work on this blog in An Enterprise 2.0 Poster Child in the IT Department The NHS example goes beyond that effort and shows how Enterprise 2.0 can be successful across a collection of large groups within a very large organization. The UK’s National Health Service (NHS) is the fourth largest employer in the world. It will be interesting to see if the successful deployment of an Enterprise 2.0 platform in one branch spreads across this very large organization. enterprise blogs enterprise wikis web 2.0 enterprise 2.0 business blogs enterprise social media

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