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By Laton McCartney
Computer Sciences Corp. announced Monday that its business-to-business social networking community, Wikonnect, has reached critical mass, with more than 8,000 users. Of those, more than 5,000 are CSC clients, most of them IT staffers from nearly 700 insurance and annuity companies, according to Marian Herbst Kelley, CSC's director of media and analyst relations.
Wikonnect, which CSC claims is one of the first B2B social networks, launched late last September after the vendor's customers voiced the need to be able to interact more among themselves and with CSC representatives. The company has a large footprint in the insurance industry, says Kelley, providing outsourcing, technology consulting and intellectual property protection. Clients include Geico and Conseco.
Wikonnect users include some CIOs, but most are IT staffers and programmers. Typically, they rely on the network to collaborate among themselves and with CSC developers in addressing technical issues and keeping current with new technology initiatives, Kelley says.
CSC developers built the customized site, which leverages the latest Web 2.0 technology, in less than six weeks using an open source framework and widgets provided by Liferay, a company specializing in open source portal and social collaboration software. The site runs on hardware supplied by Sun Microsystems, a longtime CSC alliance partner.
The agile development framework enables new features, many of them requested by users, to be added quickly, says CSC. For instance, on the second day of the launch week, a client suggested that e-mail addresses be available to enable direct member contact. That feature was deployed the next day.
The site has been successful in shifting the focus of customer interaction from person-to-person to community-to-community. Says Kelley: "Wikonnect demonstrates the application of social networking in a context that enables and empowers emergent behavior with CSC's solution groups, client communities and any combination of the two. The instant collaboration brings transparency and opportunities for clients to directly influence ongoing projects."
CSC, Kelley says, intends to soon extend the network to insurance clients in Asia and also plans to roll out similar networks in other sectors including financial services.
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