Social Bookmarking gives a health check for BUPA

Keely Flint, Lead Information Architect for BUPA, kicked off her case study talking about the private health giant's corporate culture as somewhat “cerebral”. In her task to bring improvements to internal communication processes and as part of her role, Social Bookmarking software, it emerged, was to become a key tool.
Flint told us how she spent months looking at the company culture, all around the organisation in fact and it became clear that the channels needed internally just weren’t there.
Identifying how important the right information is in internal communications, especially in large corporations, Flint took us through the main factors or “Three enablers” that she argued must be there. These included:
1. Visibility
2. Accessibility
3. Mobility
All three, proved essential in her implementation.
Elaborating, Flint explained that large organisations have a tendency for `silo`or isolated team cultures. Information doesn’t travel very far as it relies on distribution via a peer-to-peer and hierarchical network. The delivery of this information typically gets passed around via email and meetings. Anyone who has ever experienced working in a large-scale corporate environment compared to a small scale SME can probably identify with that sentiment. Ultimately, Flint argued, the larger the organisation, the more it is disadvantaged.
So where does social book-marking software come into all this? Flint explained to the audience that it allows users to tag and retain the information/research they have used and at a later time, share that knowledge around the organisation, or simply allow access to it. That can be multi format such as images, text video etc.
Benefits were outlined as follows:
1) Users can collect links and distribute that information quickly and effectively
2) Create a knowledge asset from tagging research and information used
3) Uncover expertise in the organisation – by finding people and their hidden skills
Flint explained how BUPA then also wanted to analyse the information that was collected and see who was using what and how. But she warned us that there are huge obstacles in taking on an initiative such as this, it is not easy.
The problem for large organisations is that its tough to “just try things” being difficult to justify these and give a measured RoI to the powers that be. This is because social networking can be quite unquantifiable and subjective when trying to measure success or even failure.
There was a need to get buy-in from people users and managers alike. Then there was of course the need for organisational control – who has the key to the filing cabinets? So to speak. Flint explained it was necessary to remember that social networking by its nature is a messy process and not a controlled process seen traditionally in such companies.
Main lessons of the last 6 months:
1. It takes a long time for people to aggregate and add content; there is a merit for people populating it with things of interest.
2. Don’t go down the governance route. If its not easy it won’t be used.
3. If people can’t see benefits they won’t use it and you can’t force them.
4. Finally an organisation needs to market the idea and reasons to the potential user-base.