Resource Management With Social Media Technology?

Is that an employee's profile is the centerpiece of the platform. In other words, all employee activity — blogs written, community and forum participation, bookmarks posted, wiki input, tags created, etc. — are all tightly linked back to an employee's profile. Therefore, the profile represents an aggregated, real-time view of the employee. For example, if a consultant is reading another consultant's blog, by clicking on the blogger's name, the reader could see all the expertise areas, interests, documents, and activities for that blogger. 

 

An employee's profile shows professional projects and work interests (e.g., bio, resume, documents, and major clients) as well as personal hobbies, interests (e.g., personal tags), and associations. The graphic of an employee's availability is listed within all this information, thus creating a data-rich context for colleagues to think about not only availability, but also fit.

 

A couple of major issues come to mind for me.  One of them is privacy or lack thereof.  Of course if you are working for a company you do not own the computer, network and software systems that they provide for you, so by default you do not have a right to the privacy of the data and use of their systems.  On the other hand, many of the social media activities that you would engage in are very much the kind of activities that most organizations these days would consider personal use rather than business use.  How would an organization know if an employees is perusing a legitimate colleague's Facebook page or getting dirt on a old high school acquaintance?  And as an employee, do you want your organization to monitor and aggregate all your social media activities both professional and personal?

 

The other issue is the hype bandwagon.  I'd say we are close to the peak of the techology hype cycle for social media.  This mirrors the same phenomenon that occured within the narrower niche of PPM systems.  These large web based systems were touted a while back ago as the answer to all project, portfolio and resource management problems for organizations and within the hype cycle, many have now gotten over the "trough of disillusionment"  with these systems.  No doubt that modern technology based tools are a valuable asset, but the focus has to be on the people and the process first.

 

This is not to say that incorporating social media to make project and resource management more effective is not worth looking into.  I've found using a twitter like feed on a project intranet website a useful way to document minor changes, issues and status on projects, especially ones where rapid development and turnaround is expected.  This can compliment daily Scrum meetings quite well if used effectively.

 

In any event, its interesting to see how one organization is utilizing social media for their project and resource management needs.