IDEO is the legendary company behind the first Apple mouse, the swiffer sweeper, "Keep the Change" campaign from American Express amongst numerous others. They are well known for their innovation and out-of-the-box thinking. I had the opportunity to hear the Project Lead for their Internal Knowledge Sharing platform called The Tube, at the Web 2.0 Expo and came away very impressed. Their main motivation for this project was to enable knowledge sharing, internal collaboration and community building within the company. The intranet is called "The Tube" and consists of Facebook like social networking (Personal Pages and Project Pages), Blogs, Wikis and a front End to their Project Management system (in-house extension to MS Project) that tracks utilization The first decision they took was to use pointers to People rather than information. Here is why a People-centric approach works better. Eons ago, when I was with PeopleSoft, someone decided that all Consultants would be required to contribute to the internal knowledge base (Lotus Notes databases in those days). Part of our compensation was decided by the number of articles we contributed. This had mixed results. Some people would take the time to add value, whereas others simply gamed the system and added content for the sake of being able to check the box. What IDEO did was to allow People to self-tag - three tags (Me in Three) in a snap-shot on a Facebook like People Page and then in greater detail on their profile. As a result when someone wants to find an expert on a topic, the Tag cloud points them to the self-described experts. Borrowing concepts from the "Semantic Web", they used common, but dynamic tags. Additionally, they also attached a PDF version of their Resume. When Pointers are to People, their sense of self-worth is involved, and I strongly believe, leads to greater participation and involvement. People Pages included Blogs (Movable Type - enterprise edition) and an area called My Work, where individuals could create a time-line based progression of the projects they worked on. Each page also has a status update - sort of like What I am doing now on Facebook.. Another interesting feature, everyone was subscribed to all (?) blogs and blog-posts were delivered using RSS via e-mail (Feedburner). Users could then choose to un-subscribe from the blogs they did not care about. Project pages contain all project related artifacts, from Business Development to Post-implementation Marketing/ PR, along with thumb-nails of the main participants and other contributors. Since IDEO has a very visual culture, people were encouraged to post pictures, sketches and other artifacts. Another very interesting feature was an interface to their internal project management system. Each person has their project utilization represented visually. so for instance if a Designer was needed on a project for two weeks, a quick glance over to their utilization reveals their availability to participate on the project. Other neat features were a Digg -like applause button. This was then created into streams such as Popular Projects and Recently Applauded Projects. Another interesting thought was that they started out being technology-agnostic. They just had a few requirements, such as: - WYSIWYG authoring - LDAP Authentication (no separate logins) - Automatic navigation (tree structure) They ended up using ThoughtFarmer. Other interesting strategic decisions was the launch of an internal marketing campaign to promote the use of the new platform. Secondly, they seeded the wiki with data from their Salary and other Benefits restructuring, which people were very interested in. This approach makes total sense - in order to make apps viral, you need to go to where the people already are; use the tools that are already integrated into their lifestyles or have great immediate value for them. For IDEO, the outcomes have been great, more than 80% of their employees (about 500 employees at eight offices across the globe) have People Pages. The presenters did not report any other metrics but referenced qualitative comments. Overall, highly impressive - I guess since IDEO has such high standards on client engagements, they recognized and implemented good design and ease of use internally as well.