Eliana Crosina

Booz Allen Hamilton: Social and Beyond

Abstract By 2008, consulting company Booz Allen Hamilton needed a more effective way to connect employees to each other and to valuable content. The majority of its consultants worked at client sites and there was a growing feeling of isolation at the firm. In addition, employee affinity to Booz Allen was starting to slip. Previous efforts at knowledge management, such as technology email lists and content management systems, had not been as effective as hoped: information silos remained. In 2008, Walton Smith and his team rolled out Hello, an enterprise collaboration platform containing tools such as social profiles, blogs, wikis, tags, and digital communities. By 2011, the platform was highly adopted by Booz Allen with ample business benefits for different stakeholders. Smith, however, faced difficult decisions going forward. Should the firm continue with internal software development/open source or should it move the Hello platform to a large, integrated vendor solution? Also, how could Booz Allen leverage its success with Hello to sell enterprise collaborative software solutions to its clients, who faced similar challenges?

On Individual Imprinting: What, When, How & Why Care

Drawing from literatures on organizational imprinting, individual identity, implicit learning and emotions, we theorize individual imprinting. We define individual imprinting as a cognitive and emo...

Booz Allen Hamilton: Social and Beyond Research Note

INTRODUCTION Todays social technologies are shaping how employees communicate and collaborate with each other and with other stakeholders including suppliers and customers. These social technologies include social media, social networking platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, as well as social applications including wikis, blogs, and social bookmarking/tagging systems. While adoption with many of these technologies started in the consumer space, organizations are increasingly using these tools inside their corporate walls. More than 50% of organizations are expected to implement at least one social technology by the end of 2011 (Koplowitz et al., 2011). There is also evidence that these technologies are starting to impact performance. In a recent study involving workplace users of social technologies, approximately 75% of the users stated that social technologies helped them to connect with the right colleagues and to timely access relevant information; 62% stated that being well connected ultimately increased their productivity; and 47% indicated that social medias ease of connectivity accelerated their ability to complete a specific project (DeGennaro, 2010).