Six Months in Copenhagen

The art of networking is rapidly changing in the 21st century. Even though I'm thousands of miles from home, I have reconnected with over 100 old friends over the past two months. It's not just a cliché, the internet is bringing the world closer together.

My social renaissance has mostly been facilitated by Facebook, the web's fastest growing social networking site. Each user begins with a personal profile page. From there you can search for friends based on their email addresses or through the institutions that you met them. Then you can join groups and causes and use a number of diverse applications. Currently, I'm facing off against my brother (in Arizona) and sister (in Michigan) in a game of Scrabble. It may just seem like fun and games at the moment, but I think there is a lot of potential for Facebook and similar networking sites to become serious business networking tools.

Around the same time I was getting hip to Facebook, I had the opportunity to talk with the head of the IT department in my Danish company. He called the meeting to discuss the differences between his system and our resources back home. I honestly thought that he was moving faster to adopt changes in communication technology than my American firm.

As our meeting concluded, he walked me through the features of their new Intranet. They use Microsoft SharePoint software to organize a site similar in concept to Facebook. It is possible to set up discussion forums and post files, links and comments. Public and private groups can be created. Individual users even have the ability to set up their own home page. The functionality of the forums is clear. However, only a few employees have embraced the new features. I believe that a new generation of engineers is going to find ways of using these communication tools that will really change the way the office runs.

Wikipedia is a good example of such a paradigm shift. Does anyone remember how you used to head to the library to look up some general knowledge in the encyclopedia? Not too long ago, people were buying encyclopedias on CD. Now you just log on to Wikipedia. It's fast and easy, and independent studies have shown that this user edited reference is just as accurate as the old bound texts. New communication technology facilitated a vast collaboration of users, and the result changed how we find answers to life's basic questions.

A few weeks ago I noted that knowledge sharing is often cited as an area that needs improvement within large engineering companies. Well, the tools to solve that problem are available; people just need to use them. The strength of a consulting engineering company is its people. Each engineer may have acquired specialized information or discovered new, more economical ways of doing some procedure. If you could just get each of these people to write down a little bit about what they know in a searchable database, you'd be creating the ultimate reference for your firm.

I think there is great potential for several types of communication resources. Engineers complain about gaps in communication, but seldom act to change that. We're all going to have to work harder at communicating to make it in the 21st century. I think social networking sites and wikis will play a part in making that happen.