Accenture & Enterprise Social Computing – Building Internal Social Profiles

In a recent webinar with Accenture, we were able to take a deeper look at how they are building their own personal social profiles to create a dynamic expert location platform throughout the company.  And so, we’ve pulled out a few key things they seemed to be most successful with.

Make It Automated

From the outset, Accenture did not want their users to fill in profile information that was already available in some other form throughout the enterprise. And so, subject to relevant privacy laws, many pieces of data were imported from HR and other systems. For example, each Accenture employee fills out a ‘skills’ profile to assist in staffing company projects. Instead of re-creating the wheel, Accenture used their internal resume system to import the existing data, adding it to each person’s online, social profile.  In addition, Accenture also decided to visually list users along the organizational hierarchy so that team members and managers could be easily discovered.

Make It Personal

Being a global organization, Accenture understands the softer side of making connections between people. And so for every social profile, not only is a user’s name spelled out, but it’s also spoken. Users can record themselves pronouncing their own name as part of their social profile. This helps to insure that no one has to worry about mispronouncing anything during an initial phone call. Each profile also has an “about me” section where personal and professional details can be shared.  These details can also be used as keywords, assisting any user in their search to find a particular subject-matter expert — or just someone who likes to travel.

Getting Users ‘Hooked’ on User-Generated Data
Once you successfully connect the experts in your enterprise, how do you develop the connections so that they continuously grow and learn from each other?  Accenture answered this by creating an aggregated stream of user-generated data where people could get ‘hooked’ on the continual feed of information.

Their strategy was very similar to one that Facebook employed back in September 2006. If you recall, this was when Facebook introduced the “news feed” - which created a lot of user chaos and a bunch of protests (http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=2207967130). After the initial resistance, this core feature allowed users to follow the activity of others. In fact, the news feed is still the main feature of Facebook’s profile page today. Accenture realized this and created a similar feature to aggregate and stream user-generated content and community activity right to a person’s profile, exactly like Facebook does.


Finally, Accenture wanted to make it easy for individuals to share their thoughts through blogs. To provide context, they included blogs as part of their initial social profile launch. Unfortunately they realized that while people were blogging, the blogs were difficult to discover and sometimes seemingly hidden on a person’s profile page. As a result, they created a separate aggregation page for all blogs so that they could be discovered by most recent and most viewed.  This content was also fed into the “news feed” activity stream which kept the information up front and center, making it easier to discover.

To learn more about how Accenture used enterprise social computing to engage staff, watch a webinar from their perspective at http://info.newsgator.com/06-01-10AccentureVideo.html

And, I welcome you to share your thoughts on this blog post or ask questions on Twitter using @esauve and #newsgator; I’ll be happy to get back to you.