Oracle Magazine - May/June 2011

“As a company that’s founded
on expertise, we need to enable
our people to reach out to
knowledge experts.”

—Lee Wheelhouse, Knowledge Sharing and Collaboration Solution Manager, Balfour Beatty

Balfour Beatty’s customers expect the company to seamlessly share knowledge, says Lee Wheelhouse, knowledge sharing and collaboration solution manager. “Oracle WebCenter is beginning to help us do that more effectively.”

portal has been designed to securely connect its employees across geographic and operating company boundaries and will allow them to collaborate, search, and share best practices in a business-oriented environment. It’s a good example of how and why organizations are adding social media to their mix of enterprise solutions.

“The challenge for us was to provide a platform that can span all our business units,” says Wheelhouse. “We needed a scalable, user-friendly solution that could interface with local systems to share information, while enabling greater collaboration and information sharing across geographic and operational boundaries. That’s where Oracle WebCenter comes in. Oracle WebCenter will be our global, scalable Enterprise 2.0 solution.”

ENTERPRISE REQUIREMENTS

Integration with back-office solutions was critical for Balfour Beatty’s global portal. Back-office systems are great at handling and supporting clearly defined business processes like procurements and HR processes, but social applications are something more creative and somewhat less predictable.

“We see Oracle WebCenter eventually giving us the best of both
worlds in that we can support core business processes and function-
ality from back-office systems, and at the same time we can imple-
ment collaboration and social media interaction,” says Wheelhouse.
“As a company that’s founded on expertise, we need to enable our
people to reach out to knowledge experts, and that’s a creative process
that requires the right type of social networks. The power of Enterprise
2.0 is connecting people that wouldn’t normally find each other.”
A key reason Balfour Beatty chose Oracle WebCenter Suite as its
Enterprise 2.0 solution was the product’s ability to integrate tradi-
tional applications and business processes with social media, social
computing, and Web-oriented requirements.

“The vision for us is to be able to break out of traditional business
processes and into a collaborative, social environment to solve prob-
lems, and then go back into the business process with the results,”
says Wheelhouse. “But it needs to be done in a seamless way.”
Another important aspect to integrating social media capabili-
ties is ensuring that they meet enterprise standards for security and
compliance. “For our purposes, the social media content created
in Oracle WebCenter could be just as important as the corporate
records, so it is subject to the same security policies, retention poli-
cies, and management policies,” says Wheelhouse.

User experience and the user interface were also critical to Balfour Beatty. “We wanted to create something that didn’t

Systems of Engagement

Organizations have had transactional systems of record for decades. From accounting to sales to human resources, enterprise applications that can keep detailed records of transactions have been refined and perfected.

But business—especially today’s business— isn’t just about individual purchases or transactions. It’s not just about what’s being sold to customers. Today’s business is about the people doing business, how they communicate, and what they need next to do their jobs.