Like the FAA, many of these companies are in the early stages of figuring out how best to use social networking tools for KM. In part, that's because "knowledge management is a business process, not a market," says Mark Levitt, an analyst at IDC. "There are a lot of processes that are tied up in knowledge management, and no single product can enable it."

Social Tools Await First Test

The FAA started thinking about how to use social networking tools in 2000, when Alan Stensland, its Eastern Service Area emergency coordinator, saw Lotus QuickPlace, a team collaboration platform, and Lotus Sametime, an instant messaging tool, at a trade show. After the 2005 hurricane season, Stensland's desire for better ways to connect his disaster recovery specialists only increased. So the FAA, a heavy IBM user, became a beta tester for what would become Lotus Connections, which includes social computing tools like Profiles (a directory of people and their expertise), Communities, Blogs, the tagging tool Dogear, and Activities (a dashboard). It also upgraded from QuickPlace to Quickr and moved to IBM's Websphere Portal.

The FAA's disaster recovery response leverages the use of these tools, which run through the Activities dashboard. Its 200 or so disaster recovery specialists invite people to join their networks via Profiles, and use Activities as a kind of electronic project bin: Voice mails, documents and their electronic receipts for a project will go into it, making it easy to track and share with other agencies, easing the hassle of post-disaster spending audits.

That's the hope. The last two hurricane seasons were mild, and no other major disasters have struck since the new tools were tested and put in place. But this summer's hurricane season is expected to be a bad one. If it is, the FAA believes it is ready to respond faster and more effectively than ever before.

Business Acceleration

Social networking tools should bring faster response time to all facets of business, says Rebecca Jacoby, senior vice president and CIO at Cisco Systems. Cisco is building a social computing platform (see "Not So Fast," Page 44) because "this is the first technology in 10 years that as a set, if utilized properly, lets you accelerate your business."

Jacoby says that Cisco sees the types of knowledge sharing these tools permit as "overarching" for business in the global era. "I can bring people from locations all over the world or different functions to participate in solving a problem or creating an innovation that allows the company to have growth," she says.