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Sabre Employees Click with "Intranet 2.0"
The airline reservation system supplier Sabre has built an intranet-based social networking site, called SabreTown, for its 9,000-strong workforce. This was prompted by the increasing geographic dispersion of its employees, as less than half of them are now based in the U.S.
SabreTown contains the features of most social networking sites, such as personal profiles, shared photos and network feeds, and it also allows users to post a question to the entire organization. The site's "inference engine" can send the question to the 15 most relevant employees, based on data they have entered about themselves.
According to the company, 60% of questions are now answered within one hour and each question receives an average of nine responses. Nearly two-thirds of all Sabre employees became active SabreTown members within the first three months of its launch, and now more than 90% are. The company partly attributes the site's success to the fact that management has ceded control over its usage to line employees.
