GE SupportCenter

Communities of Practice focused on improving processes.

     Knowledge capture

     processes

     They surface their entire org chart - 400,000 employees

     50,000 communities?  That sounds like too many.  Is it really a community or a workgroup?

          One example is an Excel community.

          RSS, Wikis, blogs, calendars, chat and more

     Partnership with Zoho for document management

Mashup implementation

     easy connection with data sources - 5 million records in and out of system daily.

     rapid iteration - agile two-week innovation cycle

     Question/Answer system - tracking questions and establishes the professional network.

     Light workflow

     100 Surveys a day

     Global development team

Enterprise scale

     architecture, cloud approach (internal), governance

          apply compliance policies into the system

          meets the need - lessens desire to go out to consumer-based tools.

No mandate - organic growth, use it or don't

Available as product through Tata Consulting.

Questions?

     What about security?

     Records management?

     Intellectual Property managment?

     Community membership management?

     How do you search against it all?

     Is everything discoverable, or are there private communities?

     How are ACLs handled in search?

     What kind of organization is behind supporting this system and extending it?

Are traditional, formal enterprise learning plans failing, or coming up short? Perhaps peer collaboration can fill the gap and play a more important role in the learning profile of all employees.

Is there a compliance aspect to learning that cannot be handled in an informal way? Examples: security compliance, business conduct, sexual harassment.

Inserting learning opportunities into business processes. The holy grail? Knowledge retention and transfer is always more effective it the information needed is presented in the context of when the user needs it.