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US giant has an evolved a collaboration framework that has revolutionised knowledge management and document creation processes

The phrase Web 2.0 might only be few years old, but the projects it effectively describes need not be so young.

US technology and services giant GE began building its internal collaboration platform and intranet in 1999. Nearly a decade of gradual development and growing adoption later, it now stands as one of the most sophisticated and powerful internal Web 2.0 projects in the world.

Dr Sukh Grewal, a former rocket scientist who now manages the SupportCentral platform, describes it as a ‘professional network’. All 400,000 of GE’s employees have a profile on the network; they can use the system to form communities around any area of interest or expertise they like.

Communities can collect and collaborate on documents, and individuals can put questions out to a group of experts, with their answers then maintained on the system for all to see.

“Even experts will not be able to document all the knowledge in their heads without being prompted,” Grewal explains. “About half of the knowledge contained in these community areas is in answers to questions; that has really justified the Q&A tool for us.”

But users soon sought something more sophisticated. They wanted a way to collaborate on projects using the SupportCentral system; as Grewal saw it, they needed workflow. His team added workflow functionality which allowed users to move documents around the organisation for approval from various relevant departments.

Using this system to draft customer contracts has cut the average time required to prepare a customer contract from three months to two weeks. SupportCentral now integrates with online word processing tool Zoho, meaning more work can be completed within the system itself.

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Elsevier
Scientific publisher incorporates community into its information services