I had the honor to recently interview Laurie Buczek of Intel, who is heading up the most ambitious and broad internal social web initiatives these days.

1. Laurie is based in the IT group of Intel, and the company has made a large-scale, corporate wide commitment to rolling out a long menu of social tools across the company. She characterizes what is going on in Intel around social web tools as ‘a heavy lift’ and ‘not an experiment’. It is certainly among the most ambitious programs we have found in our research to date.

2. They are following a phased approach, to minimize disruption and avoiding trying to do too much at once. She characterized the current, initial phase as ‘Fix What We’ve Got’, taking an earlier approach to social media, stabilizing and more widely deploying it, as well as integrating ‘professional social networking on top of that.’ This is to get the ‘mappable people network’ out in front but to allow people to start working together, to share and collaborate.
3. Laurie agrees that creating a ‘learning, knowledge-based culture’ requires broad adoption — a real network effect — and not just isolated pockets of adoption.
4. Discussing sharing, Laurie pointed out that it’s not enough to provided the tools and ask people to share: they will only do so if ‘there’s a trusted social connection.” So companies must work hard to allow fine-grained access control, so that sharing can be done 1:1, or in small claches that are smaller than official departments or teams. The sharing has to be possible at social scale.

I have to confess that I went overboard with Laurie, and the interview runs over 40 minutes. However, I believe there is tremendous value in her insights, partly because of the ambition that is driving the initiative at Intel, but principally because of her deep understanding of what makes sharing work in a work context.

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