The core features of social-networking sites such as Facebook—allowing people to use one central location to easily share ideas, updates, questions and answers with a large group of trusted acquaintances—would seem to be ideally suited to the business world as well.

But corporations trying to utilize traditional social-media tools to better manage multi-office projects and brainstorm new products are encountering a host of obstacles—not least of which is the absence of tools specifically designed to foster and facilitate collaboration among work colleagues.

Facebook, after all, was designed for friends, not for the Fortune 500. 

 But technology companies now are starting to develop "social business" platforms specifically designed for the office and loaded with applications aimed at ultimately aiding the bottom line.

A prime example of one insurer embracing this social-business technology platform is Warren, N.J.-based Chubb.

"We are in the process of rolling out an enterprise-wide social platform that is focused exclusively on business and solving business problems—by connecting people within the firm with whomever they need to work with, on either a standing or ad-hoc basis," says Jon Bidwell, senior vice president and chief innovation officer for Chubb.

EARLY ADOPTER

One reason Bidwell is confident that this new initiative will meaningfully contribute to Chubb's success is that the insurer already has had a positive experience using social media. 

Three years ago, Chubb began an innovative program that allowed employees throughout the company and a select group of producers to participate in events with the goal in mind to generate profitable growth and develop new efficiencies.

To facilitate the discusions, Chubb used an innovative collaborative software program for the events.

The group would be issued a specific challenge to solve and then given a finite time to submit ideas, usually 30 days. At the end of that time, the ideas were evaluated and the best would move on to the next phase of development and implementation.

By allowing for the input and insights of an array of experts across and outside the company, Chubb "was able to cut development time on new products to a year, which is light speed in this industry," says Bidwell.

But Chubb senior management thought there had to be an even more efficient way to share knowledge across a large organization.

Using an example from the perspective of an information-technology department, Bidwell points out that "e-mail is not an effective way to say [to a large group], 'I have a problem with this particular code I'm running. How do I fix it?'"

The solution, Bidwell says, is the multipurpose social-business platform the firm is rolling out, which he describes as "Facebook meets blog meets knowledge management because of the ability to tag and search [content]."

  He adds: "We have gone from an innovative platform with a specific purpose to a more open platform for any type of business need. So you can pull together people from across different disciplines, regions or product lines."

JIVE TALKING 

For its social-business initiative, Chubb is using Jive, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based software company.

Comparing what this solution offers versus a traditional, consumer-focused social-networking site, Bidwell says Jive is one of a "whole class of systems out there that offer different functionality. In this environment you are looking at accomplishing multiple purposes. It is not just updating your friends and posting photos."

At Jive's website (jivesoftware.com), visitors can find links to a couple of YouTube videos that provide examples of a social-business platform in action. [Digital subscribers click here to watch the video.]

Bidwell points out that social-business software does not come out of the box ready to use but needs to be customized to the individual user. It is a "misplaced belief that you turn these things on, and they are somehow self-organizing and everyone finds a reason to use it or they understand the value for getting onto it."

He continues: "You have to have a method of rolling them out that is organized and purpose driven. There needs to be a business problem—something you are trying to solve. There are companies that have bought these programs and turned them on and discovered that they have no use for it—or have put the business equivalent of Angry Birds on 10,000 desktops where people are wiling away a lot of time discussing things that have no business purpose."

An issue complicating usage of social-business tools that is particular to the insurance industry is users have to be mindful that what goes on in these discussions does not violate insurance regulations or the law.

"In a regulated, financial-services business, there is a lot of consideration around things being systems of record," notes Bidwell. "What types of business issues are discussed on these platforms? There is frankly a pretty big legal and regulatory piece sitting behind [our build out of the tool]." 

SOCIAL-BUSINESS USE CASES

Taking Jive's software and customizing it to deal with these issues, Chubb plans to have a full roll-out of its social-business platform within the next three months. 

The platform will allow employees to have "an ongoing conversation on a particular topic," says Bidwell. "It might be trying to solve a problem or to identify a best practice in another organization" that can be deployed at Chubb. 

Bidwell also sees another useful function for the platform: It will allow new employees and others with a business issue to discover how other people solved similar problems. Topics will be searchable and the conversations will form a vast database with document-management capability.

The social-business platform becomes "an extensive research library" to discover how an issue was dealt with, he says. Another big benefit for users is that it will heighten the visibility and highlight the expertise of individuals within the company.

"People like to share and be seen," says Bidwell. "Social tools give visibility. [Employees] can be seen and recognized, and that is important to them. And recognizing [their valuable contributions] will help allow ideas to percolate."

Correction: Revisions in the eighth and ninth paragraphs clarify that Chubb's initial social-media platform three years ago was a collaborative software program for individual events, not a hodgepodge of pre-existing web-based tools.