Enterprise Tagging Service social software saves IBM $4.6 million a year

As an alternative to traditional search engines, IBM introduced the Enterprise Tagging Service. The service allowed employees to add human semantics to the content on the intranet. Keywords that were more relevant to the employees than the rigid taxonomy that fitted the structural analysis of the web pages.

The Enterprise Tagging Service cost USD 700,000 to develop and was a sidebar to a number of key web properties: traditional search engine results, top content pages, and web applications like the IBM internal social brainstorming tool, Thinkplace. Using  the widget, readers can tag any page and look up tags they contributed, find others who have used the same tag and find other relevant content based on the same tag.

The ETS team conducted a survey to find out how this service helped the employees. The survey showed that they saved 12 seconds on every one of the 286,000+ searches every week. The total savings per week summed up to 955 hours equalling USD 4.6 million each year.

The original blog post is from august 2008 but still relevant – and the savings must be even higher per year in 2011.

This case might be old for some but when Shel Holtz spoke about it at the Intranet Global Forum in New York, I had not heard about it before. I hope that most of you haven’t heard about the casealready and will find it interesting.