CorpComms Magazine

UK communications company BT is launching a Facebook-styled internal social network across the company to encourage staff collaboration and boost efficiency and productivity.

After reporting a financial turnaround last week, the company is aiming to make further gains with this new internal social interface by increasing productivity and harnessing the skills of its workforce more effectively. The network can be used like a directory to track down the right specialists for particular projects from across the organisation. Members of staff will also be able to see which projects or documents their colleagues are currently working on.

The in-house tool will give every BT employee their own profile page similar to one on Facebook, with a photo, contact details, professional background, skills and interests, a wall or message board, a status bar to let colleagues know what is on your mind and a searchable FAQ section enabling others to pose questions. The friends function is replaced with a contacts database.

The profile will connect employees both inside the office and on the move, as it will be accessible to all of BT's 18,000 mobile users, as well as the company's 75,000 laptop and 25,000 desktop users.

Peter Scott, chief technology officer for end-user technology at BT, said: 'We had ended up with many platforms doing different things, and with the new system we can bring together knowledge and project management, and collaboration. He noted that in such a large organisation, small improvements to the IT infrastructure could produce massive efficiency savings when multiplied across the entire company.

'It brings some of the social networking elements into our business. People can expose much more information in real time. It is going to allow people to get plugged into other people and discover what other things are going on, and where the people are with the skills and experience that would help them.'

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