Lockheed Martin puts Enterprise 2.0 into Action

Last week I had the pleasure of speaking with Chris Kearns who is Architecture Programs Manager at multinational aerospace company, Lockheed Martin. Lockheed Martin employs around 140,000 people and is the largest defense contractor worldwide. The company has big plans around enterprise 2.0 and has already rolled out new services to their IS&GS (information services and global services) division of nearly 40,000 people.The Lockheed Martin project team began with a collaboration and document sharing application built around SharePoint and they have since added or built wiki, tagging, bookmarking and discussion functionality into their system which did not exist in SharePoint when they began the project. Their system utilizes Google for search and Newsgator for RSS feeds.What strikes me is just how amazing this all is given the nature of Lockheed Martin's work. Chris described how the use of these social tools is inherently an "operational conflict of interest" and how they've worked to overcome these challenges and are moving from a "need to know" to a "need to share" culture. Lockheed Martin is also studying generational differences in adopting social software and using these tools to capture tacit knowledge from their older employees leaving the workforce.Chris has agreed to join us at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston to share his experiences and some of the even bigger initiatives currently underway at Lockheed Martin.