Hoping to tap their collective wisdom, Bank of New York Mellon Corp. is creating a social network for employees to share ideas about everything from the company's continuing integration to basic technology problems — and even for them to solicit advice on personal issues.
The company's tech employees were told about the initiative Wednesday at a meeting in New York. It includes personal blogs and "wiki" sites, where employees can collaborate on projects, and is an example of the ways that financial companies are using technology to link employees with knowledge relevant in distant locations.
Kurt Woetzel, Bank of New York Mellon's chief information officer, said the New York company is "leveraging the human capital of the company" while in the midst of a massive organizational change, just four months after Bank of New York Co. Inc. and Mellon Financial Corp. closed their merger. "We're bringing together our community in a way we haven't in the past," he said.
Pete Johnson, Bank of New York Mellon's senior vice president of enterprise architecture and Web services, said the company is introducing "a corporate Facebook, if you will," citing the popular social networking site for young people.
Rob Koplowitz, a principal analyst at the Cambridge, Mass., technology consulting company Forrester Research Inc., said these advanced Internet tools are increasingly widespread in the corporate world, with financial companies among the leaders. Many banks already offer informational podcasts to customers and use instant messaging software.
However, unlike Web sites such as the social networks Facebook and MySpace, or the video sharing service YouTube, which have become enormously popular by enabling users to publish just about anything online, companies like Bank of New York Mellon are "being more measured in the ways they bring these tools to their" organizations, Mr. Koplowitz said.
"It's not like they're starting in a green field where they can put in anything they want," he said. "They are working against an existing landscape."
The banking company announced the tools to 250 of its top technical employees. Over the next several months plans to introduce to its roughly 6,000 tech employees the set of Web tools from International Business Machines Corp. called IBM Lotus Connections. The software includes blogs, for people to post items on issues that interest them, and wikis, which enable people to collaboratively develop, edit, and update various documents.
Eventually the company plans to roll it out to the rest of its 40,000 employees. "They all need to be able to share information," Mr. Woetzel said. "But first, we're going to eat our own dog food."
The company is taking pains to encourage people to post on a variety of topics, though it will also remind them that the tools are not anonymous and users are expected to conform to corporate standards of behavior.
Mr. Woetzel said that an initial use of the tools will be to help the technology people of the two banking companies collaborate on the integration.
During Wednesday's event, employees were beginning to explore ways to use the tools. One person, for example, mused about the potential of sharing back-office, compliance, and trading systems among the company's dozen asset management boutiques.
Later, the company plans to develop "use cases" for the tools, such as drawing together resources from around the world to build a complex product.
In the near term, Mr. Johnson said, the applications are likely to be more prosaic, for example, helping someone having difficulty printing a FileNet document in a pdf format. "You name a technology topic, I guarantee you I have 10 people who know it," he said. "You ping that community, and in a few hours you will get answers."
His own profile includes experience with artificial intelligence and learning machines, he said. Putting that information on his profile page makes him available to someone who might be considering using a neural network for fraud detection, he said.
But Mr. Johnson said the new tools will have personal uses as well. "There are all kinds of side benefits from creating these communities," he said.
His own profile includes information such as his interest in raising huskies, he said. Since posting that last week, he has heard from a colleague who is planning an Alaskan vacation and sought advice; Mr. Johnson offered tips on what to wear while mushing. "Those things help you bond and help the community work together more effectively," he said.
