GE Social Networking - est.1999

One of the greatest disadvantages of working for a large company is the inability to connect with the people across the business. Unless you know someone who knows someone else who may know of the person who can actually perform the task you want; you can be stuck for weeks in a quagmire of unanswered e-mails and frustration.

This problem is not strictly limited to corporations but also pervades academia and our personal spaces.  Fortunately, thanks to social networking applications like facebook, myspace, or linkedin, the ability to easily connect with someone with a special skill or a similar interest in proximity to you has shaped the way our generation deals with large groups of people. These social networking web applications are becoming so useful that many employees at fortune 500 companies are beginning to leverage them for internal work purposes, even if it means violating an internal internet policy.

The underlying problem is that at the end of the day, facebook was spawned for American college students attending major universities. While the company has made great strides to make it a useful tool for young professionals, it still is missing the key features necessary to make it the "game changer" it has the potential to be.

When other professionals ask me about my experiences working for GE, a company with over 300,000 employees, my normal response is that it can actually feel like a tightly knit group. How is this possible? Well it turns out GE's been playing the facebook game as early as 1999 with a custom built tool called Support Central.

Here are some interesting 1st and 3rd party perspectives from vendors, customers and employees who have had an opportunity to actually use the system and will give you some background on how it works:

• "A Humbling Experience" -  Chuck Willis, EMC


• "GE’s Enterprise Collaboration Backbone" - Oliver Marks, ZDNET


• "Information worth billions" - Interview with Gary Reiner - CNN Money

While Support Central isn't flawless and doesn't provide the same clean-line aesthetics as would expect from today's brand web 2.0, it does accomplish the lofty goal of laying the foundation for employees, vendors, and customers to connect and relate to the fabric of the company while producing some outstanding and measurable results. To me, the fact that a huge company like GE recognized the value and implemented a form of social networking through a web-based application as early as 1999 demonstrates excellent judgement and reassurance that at GE, if an idea is good and makes fiscal sense, no one will be able to stand in your way to accomplish something great.

Comments

[Greg Druckman]

Jason - congrats on yet another fantastic article! I think with GE Connect, Support Central comes even closer to a look and feel similar to today's web 2.0 applications.

[Jason Meller]

Greg, I think the greatest part about GE Connect (a profile-based social networking component of GE's Support Central) is that it shows as a company, we now understand that their is value in ensuring our internal applications should follow the same solid UI design practices that we pride ourselves in our external web presence at ge.com

[The Business Impact of Social]

[...] is the place to go.  The power of GE Connect to accelerate the way we do business is evident in this post from Jason Meller: “When other professionals ask me about my experiences working for GE, a [...]