About 400,000 people work at IBM, scattered in offices all over the world. To help them work together, the company has been conducting large-scale internal experiments with social software. What started as ad hoc experimentation has become a focused effort driven by the company's senior management, reaching almost all the company's employees.
As far back as 1997, IBM built an Intranet directory in an effort to help employees find others with the skills and experience they were looking for. For several years after that, employees informally built applications on top of that infrastructure. While many of those tools were helpful, they often didn't have the technical support they needed to really improve work at the company, says John Rooney, who heads the Technology Innovation Team in IBM's office of the CIO. "Projects might be running on a server under someone's desk," he says.
To read the full, original article click on this link: Experimenting on Themselves - Technology Review
Author: Erica Naone
