Bonvanie is also a proponent of employee training. He enlists his 16-year-old son, a heavy Facebook user, to help employees, whose average age is 41, apply the tool's many features to their job requirements. "We've learned how to build out our friendships into sales connections," he says.

Like Accenture's Miller and Cisco's Renauld, Bonvanie understands the risks of social networking. He takes precautions such as using SharePoint to ensure that only authenticated Serena employees can follow posted links to documents.

Web 2.0 Tools Boost Project Management

Lee Thomas, vice president of IT and product development at Berkshire-Hathaway's CORT, says that while many of his colleagues come to Web 2.0 tools to increase collaboration, he is more interested in how they increase visibility into the organization.

With oversight of IT operations, product development and quality assurance, Thomas wanted a clear view into the project pipeline. "This was a grass-roots effort started by me. I wanted a single place where I could go to see a list of what everyone was working on and be able to drill down into details on each project," he says. He also wanted to get tribal knowledge out of his team's head and into a database.

He considered SharePoint, but wanted something less complex and more agnostic. So he chose Jive Software's Clearspace platform, which he says is a perfect blend of wiki, blog and search technology that allows him to simplify project management.

For example, he says he's replaced broadcast e-mail with blogs. "My supervisor used to send messages about team strategies via e-mail. But when new people came onboard, they didn't have access to that tribal knowledge. Now all that goes into a blog so there's a history that's always accessible," he says.

Users can also search through projects posted on the wiki for critical information. "I can ask questions and quickly identify the subject experts in that area," he says.

HP's Brain

It's that kind of organic bubbling up that Bernardo Huberman, senior fellow and director of the Information Dynamics Laboratory at HP, is also hoping to generate through his social networking and collaboration projects. "We're very interested in harvesting organizational knowledge, the stuff that's not always visible within the organization. With the right tools, companies can get a sense of not only the organization, but the people who have relevant information," he says.

Huberman and his team have developed a Web-based tool called Brain, or Behaviorally Robust Aggregation of Information, that enables HP as well as other companies to tap into the intelligence of its employees.