Implementing Enterprise 2.

0 at Booz Allen: Part One Overview of Business

Drivers and Components

by Bill Ives

December 8, 2009 at 3:00 pm · Filed under Event Announcements

This is the first in a six part series on Booz Allen’s award winning implementation of Enterprise 2.0. In

June 2009, Booz Allen was honored with the Open Enterprise 2009 Innovation Award so it is a good

example to explore in depth. The award honors work done to embrace collaborative and transformative

enterprise 2.0 tools. In this first post we will look at the business drivers that led to this implementation

and overview its major components.  In future posts we will look at the change management efforts, the

operational and financial impact, the lessons learned, and plans for enhancements. Walton Smith, 

Program Manager for Booz Allen’s information sharing efforts and the lead for the Government 2.0 client

practice, has agreed to be interviewed for this series and his time is appreciated.

Walton said that in 2007 a perfect storm of events converged to prompt the creation of Hello.bah.com

(Hello) as Booz Allen’s enterprise 2.0 knowledge sharing program. Like most consulting firms, Booz

Allen’s strength lies in its people and intellectual capital thus Hello was designed to feature and foster

these two strengths. The firm had grown in recent years to 18,000 staff and there were plans, now

realized, to grow the firm to around 23,000 staff. A 2007 staff survey found that while people still felt

affinity to the firm, the strength of this affinity was slipping for the first time. More than 55% of

professional staff were located at client sites and some felt closer to their clients. These results concerned

senior leadership and they wanted to take action to strengthen the sense of community and connection

within the firm.

To meet these challenges, Booz Allen developed and implemented Hello, a suite of web-based enterprise

tools designed to strengthen collaboration, connectivity, and communication across geographical and

cultural barriers. It was created from vision to launch in under 6 months leveraging a blend of Open

Source, COTS, and custom-developed products. Since August 2008, more than 80% of the firm has logged

into Hello and more than 53% of the firm has contributed original content. There are more than 4,000

individual searches a day.

Walton said they began with the Profiles function, as they wanted the system to be people-centric rather

than document-centric. To support this goal, they also made it easy for individuals to start communities.

The vision was to have both the system’s organization and content co-developed by the people it serves.
Walton said they wanted the organization to reflect the needs of people in the field with minimal

governance versus a top-down organization chart. Any two people can start a community covering either

business or social issues, and there are now 480 active communities within the system. I think this is a

critical success factor. Every successful knowledge management system I have seen in the past 15 years

was co-developed by the users and with enterprise 2.0 this is even more important.

When Walton received approval to start Hello he asked to recruit his staff from client serving professionals

within Booz Allen. He felt that these individuals would have both the skills and the knowledge of the firm

to be successful. He made sure they had a charge code to cover themselves so they could focus on the

effort.  He also asked for as many change management people as technical people. This is another critical

success factor. I will go into more depth on the change management efforts in the second post in this

series.

Hello is not a mandated system and I think this is a good move. We will see more on how it spread virally

in my next post. Hello enables and encourages the broad adoption of social media tools to improve staff

relationships, increase connections within the firm, enhance staff affinity for the firm, support the

emergence of intellectual capital, and build client service capabilities. It is completely browser based as

many client sites do allow the downloading of applications.  Hello is integrated with other firm

applications such as  HR, security, email, and document management systems.

Hello’s technical development used an Agile process, rolling out new functionality every two weeks.  The

“perpetual beta” biweekly development sprints generated opportunistic and targeted features increasing

Hello’s value to users and influencing adoption.  There are a number of components, some created as a

result of user input, and Walton gave me some background on each.

Profiles are one of the central focuses of the system. The Hello team made use of existing authoritative

staff data and allowed each person to augment their Profile with a photo, short bio, and expertise or

personal tags.  A guiding concept was that no one would have to re-enter data already on another Booz

Allen system.  There are links to all content and communities that the person is connected with.  You can

add connections to people in a manner similar to Linked In  or Twitter and tag your connection in the way

you know them.  In the first seven days of this feature they had over 10,000 new connections. You can

sort profiles by the tags to see who has what skills, experience, and interests.  This is a significant help in

staffing projects and finding people for project and firm efforts.

Wikis were already in place to allow people to co-develop content. Hello integrated the standalone wiki

application with the rest of the platform’s tools, including a link to profiles. This exploded the usage and

helped with the viral promotion of Hello.  Now wiki content became transparent to everyone. Walton gave
the example of a key white paper development effort that picked up contributions outside the original

team.

Blogs are used as the broadcast medium. Anyone can create a blog and anyone can subscribe to it. Again,

it is linked to a person’s profile. Subscribers get email alerts on new posts with the ability to link to the

post for comments. Walton was able to encourage senior Partners to start blogs. Employees appreciated

the honesty with which these first time bloggers approached issues. For example, one senior partner

raised an important issue through his blog and got 32 comments on the blog and many more informal

references as he walked the halls. He invited the 32 commenters to lunch and together they worked

through the issue. The results were placed on his blog.

Social Bookmarking provided a less time consuming way to get involved.  Bookmarks on the Hello get

tagged and linked to both people and communities. You can follow a tagged topic and/or a person’s

bookmarks.

Forums were not part of the original plan but people wanted the ability to go deeper to a dialog over

issues than the blog format provided. They also wanted to get rid of emails asking such questions as “who

do you know that knows X” or “who do you know that has certain skills.” I remember getting many of these

in my inbox during my days at a large consulting firm. Now these questions can be raised in a forum and

people go there to find and contribute answers.

Communities provide one of the most valuable components of Hello yielding new knowledge and

intellectual capital for the firm. Any one can go to a community to find all related content aggregated in

one place, regardless of what format it entered Hello (blog, wiki, etc.). As I mentioned there are over 480

communities now and they act as the glue for the system.

Hello is a great resource with clear usage guidance for each tool. The definition and differentiation of each

component was one of the success factors I found in the Océ enterprise 2.0 suite I reported on earlier (see

Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Océ). The learning group at Booz Allen has gone a step further and

requested that the proper use of Hello be included in new employee orientation and this is certainly a

good move. It should significantly reduce the on-boarding time and decrease the connection curve for

new employees.

In my next post I will discuss with Walton the change management efforts that have been undertaken to

ensure adoption. For Twitter comment son this series please use the hashtag #bahe20. Thanks.
This is the second in a six part series on Booz Allen’s award winning implementation of Enterprise 2.0,

termed the Hello.bah.com (Hello). In June 2009, Booz Allen was honored with the Open Enterprise 2009

Innovation Award so it is a good example to explore in depth. In this second post we will look at the

change management efforts and results.  In future posts we will look at the operational and financial

impact, the lessons learned, and plans for enhancements. Walton Smith, the Program Manager of Booz

Allen’s information sharing efforts and lead for the Government 2.0 client practice, has agreed to be

interviewed for this series and his time is appreciated.

As Walton mentioned in our last post, the challenge is only in part technical.  Broad culture change and

user input became integral to Hello’s rollout and acceptance within the firm. This is one reason he staffed

the team with as many change management people as technical people. Enterprise 2.0 systems are more

transformative than many past technologies. Walton said that in the past a person with the most

knowledge has power. Now the person with the most connections has power.  This is also what Maria

Azua found (see The Social Factor by Maria Azua: Enterprise 2.0 Primer).

This transformation has to be both understood and accepted in the organization. Walton related a meeting

with 25 partners about the new transparency. One person focused on risk and said a rogue employee

could determine the best experts in a topic and then try to recruit them. Another saw the upside of being

able to find the right person for a staffing challenge at any point in time, even the middle of the night. For

most, the benefits far outweighed the risks.

Hello is not a mandated system like email. It was rolled out in a “soft” launch and then promoted virally.

Walton wanted to have good content on the system before many people experienced it. He told the story

of Partner who was bit skeptical. He asked her to look into what information the system had in her area.

She found over 200 documents, many she was not aware of, and became a supporter.

Much of the promotion was targeted to staff  with 5 to 15 years experience as these people have the

connections and knowledge to make the system become widely adopted and useful.  Walton found that

personal meetings worked best, either one on one or in small groups. People did not want to hear about

the new tools but rather how their jobs could be made easier and more productive.  This is where the

advance priming of the system with sufficient content proved useful as the focus of these meetings could

be more on the tangible accessing of people and content than the potential of new tools.

Walton started the roll out in the largest office outside of the central offices. He wanted people in the field

to feel that the system was for them and supported their needs. He also wanted their input in the early
phases to ensure this objective was achieved. I certainly agree and have found that getting field input at

the early stages is another critical success factor.

The Hello team used the Prosci change method in conjunction with the enterprise 2.0 adoption curve to

drive adoption. Prosci posits that all change occurs at the individual level, thus individual change is

necessary to bring about team and organizational transformation. Prosci advocates building strategy

around creating Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Action, and Reinforcement (ADKAR). Hello’s change

strategy used the ADKAR approach to focus messaging for social media advocates, early adopters, mid-

adopters and late adopters. They did not invest in resistors as they either will adopt at their own pace or

will continue to resist.

I think this approach makes sense but it is the personal aspects more than the specific methodology that

makes this implementation successful. Now more than 80% of the firm has logged into Hello,  53% have

added content, and there are more than 4,000 searches on the system every day. These are impressive

numbers. In my next post, I will cover the financial and operational impact. For Twitter comment son this

series please use the hashtag #bahe20. Thanks.

Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Booz Allen: Part Three – Operational Impact.

by Bill Ives

December 15, 2009 at 9:32 am · Filed under Event Announcements

This is the third in a six part series on Booz Allen’s award winning implementation of Enterprise 2.0,

termed the Hello system. In June 2009, Booz Allen was honored with the Open Enterprise 2009 Innovation

Award so it is a good example to explore in depth. In this third post we will look at the operational impact.

In future posts we will look at financial impact, the lessons learned, and plans for future directions. Walton

Smith, Program Manager for Booz Allen’s information sharing efforts and the lead for the Government 2.0

client practice, has agreed to be interviewed for this series and his time is appreciated.

Walton and I began at the high level. Hello marked several new directions for Booz Allen. First, the

technology was designed to reflect the way the firm worked. In the past many times technology has been

rolled out and the firm has had to adapt to the structure of the technology.  This alignment of tools to

work resonated well with me as I have seen the excitement and commitment that this approach can

generate in the field. The enterprise 2.0 tools are particularly capable of aligning with work practices since

they support interactions rather than transactions.  They can become the glue that brings people, content,

and data together, and this is the approach that Booz Allen took.

Second, it changed the concept of who owns intellectual capital. In the past, many teams felt they owned

the ideas and work they created.  Now there is a greater sense of a global firm and a realization that the

more people who have access to content and the more who contribute to it, the stronger the content will
be and the stronger the firm will become.  This is consistent with the concept of knowledge is power

transforming into the concept that sharing knowledge is power discussed in prior posts.

Third, there is also a greater sense of individual responsibility as people are better empowered to manage

their identity in the firm and their career development. The Hello tools provide both greater control and

increased transparency. So the firm is now more global, and at the same time, more of a collection of

empowered individuals rather than a collection of partially siloed teams. We will cover more on this in the

next post on financial impact. The firm is better able to grow organically to meet market needs rather than

be constrained by organization structure and boundaries.  There are fewer large formal groups in the firm

since Hello’s launch and many more informal communities around areas of interest.
At a more detail level, staff now build their professional networks in Hello in a way that wasn’t possible

just two years ago. Hello has helped bridge the geographic divide of staff located in more than100 US

offices and client sites, building relationships and fostering collaboration across teams. Stronger staff

relationships yield stronger clients solutions and lead to growth in business.

The People Profiles discussed in the first post are one driver of this change. They have transformed the

staff experience from dependency on in-person introductions and multiple data entry portals, to one of

discoverability and visibility firm wide.  Staff information including name, email, team, office location,

managers, resume, education, certifications, languages and past clients were pulled from existing

authoritative databases eliminating duplicate data entry and new password requirements.  A short

biography, staffing availability, and tags for expertise, personal attributes, and hobbies encourage

customization.  The People Profile includes activity feeds reflecting community memberships, blogs, wiki

and forum activity, bookmarks, and other site activity.  The Colleague Connections feature provides the

emergence of relevant relationships through tagging, enabling views of colleague activity, interests and

reporting relationships. In addition, a recently added employee mapping feature provides a dynamic visual

graphic of administrative reporting chains for any employee, as well as making visible shared Colleague

Connections. More on this is the next post on financial impact.

Hello is an open platform providing a voice and visibility for any employee at any level.  This transparency

provides both opportunities and risks for staff and the firm, however Booz Allen has been reassured on

both content security and its staff professionalism. Integration of Hello into project staffing and new hire

orientation processes reduces staff support for these processes, speeds identification of staff for client

work, and increases utilization of staff and utilization of Hello.   Using Hello as a collaboration tool,

employees benefit from a colleague’s experience on a project thus saving time and informing decisions.

As mentioned in the beginning of this post, the rise in importance of communities versus formal

organizational structure is another key change. The Communities feature in Hello is a key driver here. 

Building this feature has been central to transferring knowledge and expertise, generating new intellectual

capital, and creating relationships supportive of cohesive project teams.  As discussed in the first post, the

Communities feature is a custom tool, aggregating multiple sources of content including announcements,

event calendar, membership list,member expertise tag cloud, linked communities, blogs, forums, wikis,

and bookmarks.

I think these organization impacts reflect the spirit and goals of enterprise 2.0 and clearly demonstrate

that enterprise 2.0 is much more than technology. Enterprise 2.0 is a change in the way of doing business

that is supported by the technology. The Booz Allen experience does show that new technology can
change the way people work as long as it is done right. Paradoxically, if the technology is aligned to the

way people work, it is more likely to successfully change they way the work and gain their commitment to

this change. In the next post we will look at the financial impact of these changes. For Twitter comment

son this series please use the hashtag #bahe20. Thanks.

Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Booz Allen: Part Four – Financial Impact

by Bill Ives

December 18, 2009 at 9:38 am · Filed under Event Announcements

This is the fourth in a six part series on Booz Allen’s award winning implementation of Enterprise 2.0,

termed the Hello system. In June 2009, Booz Allen was honored with the Open Enterprise 2009 Innovation

Award so it is a good example to explore in depth. In this fourth post we will look at the financial impact. 

In future posts we will look at the lessons learned and plans for enhancements. Walton Smith, Program

Manager for Booz Allen’s information sharing efforts and the lead for the Government 2.0 client practice,

has agreed to be interviewed for this series and his time is appreciated.

There have been two types of financial impacts. First, there has been increased operational efficiencies

and effectiveness in many areas including both sales and delivery. Second, there has been increased client

opportunities for work similar to Hello as many clients have the same needs that led Booz Allen to

implement an enterprise 2.0 solution.  I will first cover the internal benefits.

Staff retention and utilization have a tremendous impact on Booz Allen’s finances. Improving the firm’s

ability to rapidly find and deploy qualified employees to staff government contracts contributes to meeting

and exceeding financial targets.  While there are likely a number of contributing factors, the firm has

experienced month over month staff utilization improvement since Hello was implemented, even in a

down economy.  Much anecdotal evidence supports the connection of this improvement with efficiencies

generated by Hello. For example, many Partners find it easier to create project teams with the right
experience to both win work and delivery it. This is especially true when meeting last minute demands

that require going beyond what personal networks and email queries can provide.

Booz Allen does not have a large army of staffing people like some of the consulting firms I have

experienced.  Before Hello it was hard for them to keep up with demand. Spreadsheets would be

generated that became out of date as they were completed. Now Hello allows individuals to keep their

profiles and availability current. It also makes it easier for those in need of staff to find these profiles. This

increased self-service with better real time data allows the staffing people to address more strategic

issues than the tactical tracking of current availability.  Linkage to those responsible for available staff

allows the right staffing discussions to occur in a timely manner. Walton said that once a Partner has been

successful in staffing and winning work through Hello, it often becomes the first step in future efforts.

They also become big advocates of the benefits of Hello.

Booz Allen has also had increased staff retention since Hello was implemented.  This goal was one of the

business drivers mentioned in the first post in this series. While the down economy may have an impact

here as people do not have as many alternatives, there is again anecdotal evidence on the benefits of Hello

for increased control over career development which leads to increased motivation and retention. A person

is more likely to get staffed on a project that reflects the interests and experience noted in their profile. 

They are also more likely to find the right contacts and intellectual capital to allow them to succeed in

their areas of interest contributing to their preference to to stay with the firm.

Booz Allen has won several multi-million dollar contracts based on the firm’s experience with Hello and

technology infrastructure as many government agencies are faced with the same challenges.  Walton said

that the Washington Post recently reported that the US Federal government will need over 500,000 new

employees in the next few years to replace its aging work force. These people will need to be on-boarded

and the collective intelligence of the existing work force will need to be harvested to pass on to these

employees.

Many younger employees expect the rapid access to information that they have experienced on the Web. If

the agencies do not provide such tools, they often go outside the firewall to resort to unsecure Web tools.

Having your own enterprise 2.0 tool set avoids this issue while bringing in the ability to maintain security

and gain analytics on the work processes within the agency.

Walton said that in many cases agencies have 70 – 80 percent of the content just as Booz Allen did, but

they need the glue in a system like Hello to bring it together and make it transparent.  He also made a very

important point: Booz Allen does not try to sell Hello as a product.  It sells the expertise gained through

the successful implementation of Hello. Every organization has different needs.  I have seen other

consulting firms fail when they tried to make a particular client engagement or even their own system into

a product.  It is nice to see that Booz Allen is not falling into this trap.

In my next post, I will cover some of these lessons learned in implementing Hello. For Twitter comment

son this series please use the hashtag #bahe20. Thanks.

Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Booz Allen: Part Five – Lessons Learned

by Bill Ives

December 21, 2009 at 9:14 pm · Filed under Event Announcements

This is the fifth in a six part series on Booz Allen’s award winning implementation of Enterprise 2.0,

termed the Hello system. In June 2009, Booz Allen was honored with the Open Enterprise 2009 Innovation

Award so it is a good example to explore in depth. In this fifth post we will look at the lessons learned.  In

the last post of the series slated for early January, we will look at the plans for enhancements. Walton

Smith, has agreed to be interviewed for this series and his time is appreciated.

There were five main lessons learned. First, it is very useful to segment stakeholders by team and level.

This can provide insight to their unique needs and interests. This segmentation enabled the Hello team to

develop and adapt adoption strategies and messages. There were three main groups. The most senior and

junior ones were the easiest to engage. First the new hires, part of the “Facebook” generation, expected

access to the content they needed. This group did not yet have much content to contribute but they were

relatively easy to engage in a social media based system.  At the other end, the senior management

understood the strategic value of the Hello system.  They became engaged to provide leadership, support

the firm’s investment, and serve as models for the rest of the firm.

The middle group, who had 5 to 15 years experience, possessed much of the valuable content and

connections. They did not have the same motivations as the other two groups but it was essential to get

them engaged. They needed to be addressed in terms of the business value to them and not in terms of
introducing new tools or even approaches.  For example, shifting messages from “use Hello to network” to

“Hello can help you do your job better” was helpful. These people were used to one-to-one

communication through email or in person. They had to be moved to see the value of one-to-many

communication so others could access and archive their insights. Much of the change management efforts

were focused on this group.

The second lesson was the essential nature of generating active and visible executive leadership to

encourage and prompt use among teams and staff less interested in Hello’s resources. Sample efforts

included coaching executives to help them model effective use of Hello.  Getting this executive buy-in

helped set cultural norms on usage of Hello. For example, they would send the request to their staff to

complete their Hello profiles and made sure that their own profile was already filled out as a model.

Leaders also posted discussion questions to forums and responded to feedback. Hello participation was
used in annual assessments. This support also helped get the right funding and overcome organizational

barriers. For example, it was essential to accomplish the integration of Hello with the firm’s other

enterprise applications.

The third lesson involved recruiting early champions at all levels across geographies. This promoted viral

adoption and provided an ongoing source of user feedback for the frequent Agile updates to the system.

In addition, champions assisted in overcoming barriers associated with prior intranet services and portals.

The Hello platform does not have a separate Help Desk service so the champions supported new users. I

also think this personal touch was more effective than an independent Help Desk representative that does

not have the same job functions as the users. Champions also put in the initial content so new users

would find useful information when they first logged in. This was critical to getting people to come back.

The fourth lesson was the importance of profiles. Part way through the implementation, the Hello team did

a stakeholder survey of a fourth of the firm. They found that those who had completed their profiles were

more likely to use the system and contribute content. Focusing users on adding content to their profiles

has lead to their further exploration of the platform and greater usage of Hello’s tools.  They encouraged

everyone to get their profile complete and pre-filled as much as possible with existing data from the HR

system. This filling in of profiles also helped to clean up the data in the HR system, as staff would make

corrections to existing misinformation.

The fifth lesson involved getting the key stakeholders engaged in the implementation process from the

start. Building relationships with core services such as Human Resources, Learning and Development,

Legal, Email, and Security became pivotal links to the firm’s structure, and tested the Hello team’s ability

to partner internally. It is easy for people to say no when they first see things mostly completed and they

were not involved. For example, the Legal people are more likely to just say no to perceived risks out of

caution when they do not understand something. However, if they are engaged up front they will be more

likely to come up with solutions to concerns and have a great sense of ownership of the issues. I have

seen this myself on numerous knowledge management implementations (see for example, KM Stories: Part

Four – Gaining Support at All Levels).

I think this is an excellent set of lessons learned. They all resonate with my prior experience. Walton

added an important sixth one – be flexible. I would add – listen – and this was something they did at all

stages.  In the next post, I will cover their plans for the future and offer links to the complete series. If you

use Twitter to comment on this series pleas use the hashtag #bahe20. Thanks.
Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Booz Allen: Part Six – Plans for
Enhancements

by Bill Ives

January 4, 2010 at 3:21 am · Filed under Adoption, Enterprise 2.0

This is the last in a six part series on Booz Allen’s award winning implementation of Enterprise 2.0, termed

the Hello system. In June 2009, Booz Allen was honored with the Open Enterprise 2009 Innovation Award

so it is a good example to explore in depth. In this final post we will look at the plans for enhancements.

Walton Smith, has agreed to be interviewed for this series and his time is appreciated.

Walton feels that they have done a good job with the unstructured content generated by the firm and I

would agree. Now he sees that the next task is to integrate the more explicit structured content found in

the existing document repositories. There are several issues here. First, the more formal content tends to

be organized to align with existing formal organization structure. However, this structure is always

evolving so the organization of data gets out of date easily.

In contrast, the Hello system is organized around communities that reflect the capabilities of the firm.

They tend to evolve in a more organic manner to keep up with market needs. This structure is more

flexible, and, at the same time, existing communities tend to grow and not simply change and get out of

date. Walton said they needed to change the organization of more formal content to reflect this more

flexible approach. The key is making sure that all relevant content and people can be found.

At times more formal content might be restricted in access because of client concerns and/or “scrubbed”

of some of its content.  However, it is often the people who created the content that others need to access

rather than the details which might get out of date quickly. Partners looking to staff efforts need the right

expertise that can create new content specific to the needs of their client. The content needs to be

structured so access to the content creators is facilitated even when the content itself is restricted. The

Hello team also wants to encourage content contribution through the communities so it becomes a normal

part of the work process.

Additional upcoming planned functionality includes a rating system to permit users to rate the perceived

value of content. Walton said that a rating system can be dangerous when there are small numbers. He did
not want someone to get a bad rating right at the start and not contribute again. So they delayed the

implementation of the rating system until Hello was mature and had significant participation.

They are also creating a user dashboard to enable users to aggregate and track information important to

them. It will work like an iGoogle interface as you can customize what appears on your own dashboard.

Walton feels that this will drive greater usage as people can better fit Hello to their needs.  This is

especially important for people on restricted sites where they cannot use their own laptops and cannot

download anything on the government computers.  Having the dashboard combined with a cloud system

will provide easier access to what individuals need.

Hello also plans to provide video integration.  Walton said there are many good tools available and video

will provide a richer format for collaboration. He also wants to have a video production capability that

works like an internal YouTube. This will allow staff to create a short video on lessons learned and other

issues when they do not have time to make written contributions. In addition, Booz Allen has an existing

rich library of video content that Walton wants to be made more widely available. All of this makes sense. 

I wish I had these features when I worked for a large consulting firm a few years back.

This is the final installment in our look at Booz Allen’s enterprise 2.0 implementation. I hope you find it

useful in your efforts. Please let us know what you are doing. If you use Twitter to comment on this series

please use the hashtag #bahe20 so it will be easier to find what others are saying.