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Cloud Computing

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develop a service for promoting high-impact innovations. A fundamental premise of the
initiative was that it would be based on social networking to provide an interactive
environment in which individuals could comment on case studies, exchange ideas and
contribute their own material.
The NHS Institute was given a deadline of just eight weeks to put the system into place.
In view of the short timeframe, the organization did not have the option of approaching
a systems developer and establishing an elaborate set of requirements. "We needed to
deploy a social networking solution that was ready to go to work right out of the box,"
says Nick Gaunt, chief information and knowledge officer at the NHS Institute, "but at the
same time, we also needed a product that could be customized to allow for both internal
and external networking."
The internal customer was the NHS Institute itself, and the external groups were the other
organizations of the NHS. "Although the NHS may appear to be a single entity, it is
actually several hundred organizations working under one umbrella," Gaunt says.
"Therefore, we needed to have a mixture of private and public-facing interactions, a
capability that many social enterprise networking products do not offer."
Incremental Approach

After narrowing the search to a half-dozen candidates, the NHS Institute selected Clearvale,
an enterprise social networking platform from BroadVision. "We wanted to extend our
static website with the capabilities of an interactive site that incorporated blogs, wikis,
comments and other features," Gaunt explains. "and Clearvale was able to provide those
components out of the box as well as to modify the basic software within our time
requirements."
Since the NHS Institute had not previously deployed enterprise social networking, it took
an incremental approach to introducing the new application to employees. "We had primed
the site with content relevant to our users," Gaunt says, "and we have started by allowing
people to comment, participate in polls and join discussion forums." The response has
been very positive, with steadily growing participation.

One activity the NHS Institute used to promote engagement by employees was a challenge
to put forth ideas that would help improve the patient experience. The competition resulted
in 145 nominations of project ideas that could be carried out. The nominations were
judged, and the NHS Institute awarded grants to the top nine to share their project ideas
throughout the NHS. "There is a tremendous amount of innovation going on in healthcare,"
Gaunt says. "For us, one of the biggest challenges is to help others discover these innovations
and to make sure the good ideas are being adopted."
Changing the Dynamics
Over time, the NHS Institute will broaden participation on the site so that users can take
more initiative, contributing their own case studies, for example. In doing so, Gaunt
anticipates a shift in the roles of the initial organizers in the NHS Institute and the
community participants. "We are working on getting the right balance," Gaunt says,
"facilitating management of the site centrally while encouraging members of the
community to keep the conversation going in their areas of interest."
In addition to providing cross-fertilization among different organizations, online social
networking enhanced the interaction of individuals in face-to-face workshops. "We ran
some workshops to bring the community together in a physical setting," Gaunt says. "The
previous online experiences changed the dynamics of the workshops and made them

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