Keely Flint from BUPA has kindly contributed this blog post:

As Lead Information Architect at BUPA, I thought it might be useful to give you a quick summary of the presentation I gave at the Blogs and Social Media Conference 2.0 yesterday, where I talked about our experiences trialling Cogenz.

BUPA have been trialling the Cogenz social bookmarking software for 6 months with 50 users from Head Office, to create a shared library of information resources and harness the collective intelligence of the workforce.

We call ourselves a ‘cerebral’ organisation, so it’s crucial that we find a way to ensure information flows throughout the company, and people and information are connected at the right time to maximise effective decision making and corporate communications.

Our key objectives for social bookmarking at BUPA are as follows:

1. Facilitate networking across the organisation
2. Create a knowledge base on the intranet, improving intranet search
3. Analyse tag patterns as a source of information about intellectual capital within the organisation
4. Feed users’ content tags into Autonomy search engine to improve automatic indexing of content

My key findings of the Cogenz trial so far are:

1. Only 10% of users contribute, the rest are browsers. This is probably fairly typical of how social networking operates in the ‘real world’
2. It is important to pre-populate the system with useable content so that employees see a critical mass of useful bookmarks when they first use the system. You can import all your del.icio.us tags into Cogenz which is very useful.
3. It needs to be accepted that there is no governance; it’s not a filing cabinet
4. If it’s not easy, people won’t use it. Cogenz is very straightforward to use, so take-up has been good.
5. Employees need to see the benefit of the system to encourage them to use it; integrating Cogenz into existing systems and processes via their API is one way to achieve this
6. Funds are not as important as participation
7. Both top down and bottom up support is needed
8. Market the system and its benefits furiously

The trial seems to have been a success so far, so I’m now looking at how Cogenz could be rolled out on a wider scale within the organisation, and in particular how it could be used as the main way to categorise and search information on our corporate intranet.

To find out more about my work and what I get up to, please take a look at my blog