IT services firm Accenture has been ramping up its internal
usage of Web 2.0 technologies, as part of its "Collaboration 2.0"
initiative.
The initiative calls for the extensive use of
"web mashup" technology. This is behind Accenture's social
networking community site, internal wiki website, YouTube-style
content sharing site and a number of unified communications
applications.
Frank Modruson, CIO of Accenture, said, "For any organisation
that works together in teams, collaboration is inherently part of
what they do.
"Anything we can do to help the collaboration process is
important, and our clients are also very interested in what we are
doing."
The service firm's goal is for each of the new web-based
applications it brings online to be accessed as soon as possible by
all of its 186,000 employees in 52 countries.
By doing this, it aims to drive efficiencies through
communication and collaboration, and reduce travel costs.
Accenture's software engineers develop the firm's web mashup,
and Web 2.0 applications, in Microsoft dot.net, making extensive
use of SharePoint Server, Microsoft's portal and enterprise content
management product.
It integrates these applications into Office Communicator,
Microsoft's unified communications platform, so that they can be
accessed over the Internet Protocol (IP)/Multiprotocol Label
Switching (MPLS) network from around the world.
Web mashup is a term used to describe how data from more than
one source is combined into a single integrated tool, and delivered
via an individual web page.
The Google Maps web service is, perhaps, one of the best known
examples of a web mashup, mixing cartographic and directory data to
create and present dynamic, and personalised web pages for an
individual users.
One of the ways Accenture is using web mashup is in its social
networking application, Accenture People, which it deployed in
early 2007.
The firm's development team wanted to combine features from
popular consumer websites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Wikipedia and
YouTube, to enable the 186,000 employees to share interests and
knowledge online.
They wanted the tools to be familiar, easy to use, and require
minimal training.
The resulting Accenture People web application puts the
end-users in control of what information they choose to share -
both professional and personal - in a protected environment, said
Modruson.
He added that some of the benefits this has brought include
speeding up the search process for finding relevant experts within
the firm.
As part of Accenture People, the firm also developed a
Wikipedia-style site called Accenture Encyclopedia, to catalogue
Accenture business and technical terminology.
It recently went live with its YouTube-style site, Accenture
Media Exchange, for content management and knowledge exchange.
The idea is to give staff at work the mixture of interactive
sites and user collaboration that they enjoy in their spare time,
explained Modruson.
"Users create and share the content, and by being IP-based, and
having a common infrastructure, it makes creating web-based
collaboration tools easier [for the IT team] to do. By making
everything browser-based, it is very easy to add in new features,
such as Media Exchange, which lets users post things on the web,"
said Modruson.
"Once you introduce any of these web-based components, such as
new People Pages, they are instantly available to 186,000 people,
and that is the beauty of this technology."
The limitations of web mashup, and Web 2.0 technology in
general, is firstly security, said Modruson, but he argued that
this is "a given" whether the platform is client, server or web
browsers.
"That is always going to be there - the bar just goes up. The
not so nice people have also become more sophisticated," said
Modruson.
Secondly, encouraging users to adopt the new tools is an issue,
as Accenture frequently adds new collaboration tools and browser
plugins.
The firm uses a special internal site called beta.accenture.com,
which showcases and publicises new tools and utilities, using web
mashup to continually mix and update the content.
It also uses old fashioned peer pressure to encourage employees
to use the new tools. The firm's main portal.accenture.com
intranet, encourages employees, for example, to update their
directory profiles, add new personal content, or use the latest
tools, said Modruson.
An example of this is Media Exchange, which initially had 318
video items posted on it when it launched in the autumn.
By the end of October 2008, it had 1200 items, and by December,
there were more than 1600. These included executive interviews,
project team presentations, and humorous snippets, and came from
users around the world.
However, Modruson added that as sites become popular, the IT
team must be ready with the back-end infrastructure in place to
support them.
"With successful applications, their adoption scales quickly -
up to 186,000 people in 52 countries - and that is 10,000 client
sites as well as our own sites.
"When you are that distributed, yesterday's new application is
yesterday's legacy application that has got to run all the time.
Preparing for that rapid scale-up is key," said Modruson.