Paul Gillin, auteur de 'The New Influencers', revient sur les expériences de la holding Sabre, d'IBM, Pfizer, des hôtels Hilton ou encore de l'assureur Wachovia pour justifier de l'intérêt pour l'entreprise de disposer d'un réseau social.

Web 2.0 really is going behind the corporate firewall, where companies like Sabre Holdings, Hilton Hotels and IBM are building social networks for their employees and customers. The key to their early successes is to focus on how people want to connect, not the IT tools they will use.

When the folks at travel company Sabre Holdings saw how people were using their new Bambora travel advisor, it got them to thinking.

Bambora is a simple social network for travelers, one of many products Sabre Holdings has developed for the travel industry. It uses a basic question-and-answer interface, so travelers can submit questions like "What's a good hotel on Mykonos?" to the community of members for answers. Answers are captured to a searchable database for posterity.

Sabre built Bambora to be a public-facing product, but managers immediately saw its utility within the company. As Sabre has evolved and diversified over the last few years, its employee base has become fragmented across the world. This has challenged Sabre to manage projects and sustain teamwork among its 9,000 employees. It had become difficult even to keep track of which skills existed within the far-flung organization.

From Bambora, SabreTown was born. The internal social network is now widely used by Sabre Holdings employees to find expertise that would otherwise have been buried within the organization. Questions entered into SabreTown are processed by a relevance engine and built into employees' personal profiles. Sabre is effectively creating a massive knowledge base that employees willingly populate with their own information.

. Web-profils.com, la place de marché du conseil et de l'ingénierie