Because we had our own technical infrastructure in DigiLab, a group I run who talent spot new technologies, it was relatively easy for us to take a suck it and see approach to tools to aid networking in the business.

The first thing we did was to put in a bulletin board. We started using it amongst a group of us to begin with and gradually started telling more people about it. Word soon spread and amazingly it is now the BBC’s second most visited internal site with staff using it daily to ask questions and get answers. It gets used for lots of practical stuff which when you add up all the quick solutions and problems avoided is saving the BBC loads of time and effort. Ask on pretty much any topic and you’ll get an answer within half an hour.

The second tool we put in is a social networking tool that lets users set up a page of info about themselves and can then be searched for particular skills or interests. It also allows users to establish interest groups which are becoming a really effective way of identifying and supporting various communities within the BBC. We are in the process of combining the bulletin board and the networking tool and once we have that I think things will really take off.

We then put in a blog server and now have around 70 blogs being written by about 100 people. They are being used for a variety of tasks from group blogs for project teams to operational logs to pass on info between engineering shifts to personal blogs capturing individual learning and experiences.

Lastly we have implemented a wiki. We chose a tool that allows us to manage access a bit. I know the principle of wikis is to be totally open but that is not always possible or approriate in current corporate culture and we have to acnowledge this and work with it. The people most attracted to using wikis are those involved in writing formal documents, policy, manuals etc.

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