Shaping Thoughts

BBC: sharing knowledge is power!

In my endless search for wisdom on the subject of the value of social software for companies, I recently revisited the case of the BBC. It may surprise a lot of you, but the big state-owned BBC is actually quite far ahead with the use of social software to improve their “internal globally distributed conversations and communications”.

The most visible champion of the BBC in terms of social software is Euan Semple. Although Euan, in his role as head of KM solutions, was not the first to implement tools like wiki’s, blogs and discussion forums at the BBC, he played a vital role in selling the tools and gaining acceptance for their use BBC-wide.

So what did the BBC do exactly? Here are a few of their achievements, as I learned from the sources mentioned below.

Discussion forum
The story starts with the introduction of a company-wide discussion forum, which just allowed people to ask questions or enter in discussions. It paid off: at one point in time more than 75% of the BBC employees (21.000 in total at the time) had used the forum.
A lot of stuff discussed in the forum is mundane, but it still helps a lot of people. Policy issues are also uncovered and discussed and policy was improved. A nice quote “Not knowledge is power but knowledge sharing is power”. The forum democratises the company (everybody is equal there) and it is perfect for geographically distributed business (like the BBC).
To close off this section I present one off Euan’s nice anecdote’s: the audio- and video editors of BBC were silo-ed (in different departments) during the work hours, but at night, at home, they were sharing their experiences and knowledge on the Internet with the world. Why not try to bring this knowledge sharing in the company?

Expertfinding
Then they introduced a tool which allowed people with the same professional interest to find each other. It helps identify the informal organisation: what people do, skills, hobbies. The tool also allowed to create interest groups.

Weblogs
Then came the weblogs. One of the leading figures that use this tool is CEO Richard Sambrook, who wanted to really engage with the people of the BBC, even on strategic issues, but not using e-mails or newsletter. A weblog allows easy and genuine feedback and it very accessible. The CEO now has a regular audience of 4000 people. It gives the CEO a new sort of internal “power”, that other executives do not have: to influence the organisation in a really authentic way in stead of staff e-mails and newsletters. Within the BBC, there are now also a lot of other internal bloggers (more than 100), while the CEO has even gone out and started an external weblog.

Despite the success of the weblogs in the BBC, Euan Semple is still rather cautious of their chance of success in other companies, because “they work on the basis of having an opinion and expressing it, which is not trivial in every organisation”. “Sometimes it may be quite difficult to say what you think”.

Wiki’s
After the weblogs came wiki’s. Euan admits that the wiki’s were the toughest, because of their apparent complexity. But they were used; at first for sharing information and creating websites for which they had no budget and in later stages also to perform company-wide collaboration on policy documents (they created a blogging policy for example), which were written without the need for actually meeting face-to-face.

RSS
RSS is also being used extensively as a way to manage the increasing number of conversations and to connect everything together.

Tagging
Finally the BBC is experimenting with tagging: allowing Internet/Intranet content to be tagged with self-invented keywords (folksonomy) allowing great sources to rise to the surface and other people to find those sources and to find people with the same professional interests.

Some additional thoughts from Euan:

• With these tool organisations get much more transparent and the real valuable parts (and people) start to surface.
• And last but not least: organisations will increasingly feel a pressure to introduce these tools by the new employees that will enter the company the coming years, employees who are from a generation where working with these tools is a natural thing: they will expect these tools to be around or…

About a half year ago, Euan left the BBC to start on his own as a consultant. On his weblog he very recently shared his experiences with spreading the message to other companies in his new role in a blog post called Consultancy 101. A couple of nice comments there also. One quote I hang on to this weekend:

“Every organisation, no matter how regulated or profit motivated employs people and those people need to trust and communicate with each other to get things done. This stuff puts those abilities on steroids.”

I completely agree!

Some interesting links:

• A really nice short presentation by Euan Semple as uploaded to Google Video (24 minutes) where he shares his experiences. You will love it!
• Website Euan Semple
• Weblog Euan Semple
• A great interview with Euan Semple

Technorati tag(s): Social software, Euan Semple, Knowledge management, BBC, Enterprise 2.0

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| posted Oct 6, 10:29 pm on Oct 06, 2006 | category: Social software / Knowledge Management