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What's in your social networking toolbox?
Social networking tools for R&D
Both IBM and Pfizer have introduced social networking tools to link their researchers. Some have worked, some haven’t. The trick seems to be to offer several tools and hope that people will cluster around those they find most useful.
Nuzrul Haque, a customer engagement manager in the research informatics group at Pfizer, said that modern businesses often include hundreds or thousands of people working in hierarchies, who habitually keep knowledge to themselves, and who are averse to digital tools because they’re difficult to use. They’re also competitive, seeking recognition to boost their careers. Choosing tools that work well in this context is difficult.
"The wiki has been amazingly successful, it hands-down beats Documentum and SharePoint, for an investment of $1000 rather than millions of dollars."
Haque
Pfizer has tried many, both open-source and commercial. It built an internal version of Wikipedia, known as Pfizerpedia, using the free Mediawiki software. A social bookmarking system - tags.pfizer.com - has been developed based on software called Scuttle. Pfizer’s Pfollow blogging platform is based on Drupal, while a ‘mash-up’ tool, which enables people to combine research data held in corporate silos in interesting ways, is based on a commercial product called Pipeline Pilot.
“The wiki has been amazingly successful,” said Haque. “It hands-down beats Documentum and SharePoint, for an investment of $1000 rather than millions of dollars.”
Haque believes the wiki has been particularly successful because it fits with scientists’ drive to express a very accurate understanding of a topic. He also says that it helped that the head of R&D provided top-level support for this kind of openness. The social bookmarking service is also well used, enabling researchers to tag journal articles with relevant keywords and then generate RSS (real simple syndication) feeds around each tag.
The blogging platform has also worked for some users, though it took some social engineering to make it take off. One of the first Pfizer bloggers wanted more readers and so wrote on his blog “If you have read this, come and see me and I will give you a chocolate bar”. That got the blog support, and helped counter concerns about what it was going to cover.
Although a lot of this software is free or open-source, commercial software still plays a role. Pfizer uses Microsoft’s OneNote and SharePoint.
“You have to admit to yourself which core technologies you can't get away from,” said Haque.
Some of the software is almost too easy to use. Pipeline Pilot, which enables people to combine data in ways that they can control, has been so successful that Pfizer now hosts thousands of Pipeline Pilot project.
“Some are good, some are bad and some of them break our databases,” said Haque.
He has also found that some of the free or open-source tools work for small groups but can't handle larger groups, and so have had to be replaced with commercial tools. There’s also an issue with providing so many tools that people need guidance to understand each of them, without trying to control the natural evolution of communities around each tool.
Haque and his colleagues have tried to ease this process by producing a presentation called Meet Jessica that shows how a future research scientist could use the Pfizer tools.
“It's a great way of sharing a vision that helps people to stop getting slowed down by the technology,” he said.
IBM has a similarly rich set of social networking tools, and although some have not been used as intended they still help collaboration. According to Matthias Kaiserswerth, director and vice president of IBM’s Zurich Research Laboratory, one of the tools is more widely used for sharing personal information than for corporate. Nonetheless, it helps: Kaiserswerth says if he is going to call a new colleague, he’ll check the site to get to know a little about them first.