Another interesting development that I noticed during my visits with IT vendors in India was the presence of vibrant online communties behind each company's firewall. Most of these organizations had blogging platforms, knowledge management systems to exchange internal expertise, rating systems, Facebook like profile pages and the like. To augment these internal platforms, employees were active users of LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and external blogs. They were using these to learn and build their personal reputations. Just as I described the 360 or total customer analytics in an earlier post, due to these practices it is now possible to build total employee reputation profiles. These profiles can be easily aggregated and shared with customers, if the company so chooses. This has several benefits. First, employees can build their professional reputations and carry it with them as they move from company to company. It would also make it easier for H/R departments to evaluate them on their reputation, project performance and management abilities. Customers benefit by having a better understanding of the resources that they are hiring
This portable context requires the employers to open their internal systems and share an employee's reputation via standardized APIs. Third party providers could create services that integrate this information with open web platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter and even communities like Amazon's EC2 and Salesforce.com's internal communties. Of course, there would be confidential information like cusotmer project details that could be hidden from third party access via the APIs. This portable context could be the new employee resume.