Social Media in a Large Government Organization

            In March of 2000, four Army captains working as professors at West Point used their spare time to launch the website www.CompanyCommand.com (now http://cc.army.mil) in order to connect junior military officers (lieutenants and captains) and foster in-depth conversations about leadership and the challenges associated with their profession.  Use of the website by officers grew rapidly, and the team started www.PlatoonLeader.org (now http://platoonleader.army.mil/) to cover topics focused on lieutenants.  After two years of expansion, military leaders recognized the value of these websites and reassigned the founding members to earn their doctoral degrees and return to West Point in order to run the newly created Center for the Advancement of Leader Development and Organizational Learning (CALDOL), now renamed the Center for Company-level Leaders (CCL).  Two of the founding members, Pete Kilner and Tony Burgess, now manage MilSpace as part of their responsibility as directors of the CCL.

            Having grown beyond the capacity of their personal resources, and requiring institutional support to continue, the founding team donated their websites to the Army in 2003, after which they were shifted to military servers and given “.army.mil” urls.  Kilner emphasizes the importance of maintaining the original ‘grassroots’ feel of the community, stating, “It’s a movement, not an organization.  We have to be an organization in one sense so we can maintain the CCL and the communities, but beyond that we’re a movement.” 

            After on-line content was directly quoted in the media, the websites were restricted to military use only and membership reached approximately 26,000.  Access was restricted not only for security concerns, but because members would be less likely to share their stories and knowledge if they thought it was going to be published in print, and not merely shared by the community.  In May of 2006, use was restricted to officers and cadets, and membership stands at approximately 8,000 for PlatoonLeader and 10,000 for CompanyCommand.  In their third major platform change, both websites were updated with Web 2.0 technology and incorporated into a single virtual environment known as MilSpace (a name proposed by Wired reporter David Axe). 

            Despite its humble origins as a basic website technology with no operational funding and minimal institutional support, the MilSpace virtual community of practice (VCoP) has become a fundamental component of the Army’s organizational structure that incorporates multiple innovative technologies such as social tagging, i-Link, wiki, RSS feeds, and dynamic content rating.  Within two years of its launch, the technology was recognized by national newspapers and was presented the Army’s Knowledge Management Award.  The Harvard Business Review recognized the website as one of the top 20 business ideas of 2006. 

Based on the success of the MilSpace technology, a number of organizations have attempted to copy their example.  An interesting case comes from within the Army itself.  In 2004, the Army launched the Battle Command Knowledge System (https://bcks.army.mil), a knowledge management system that is based on the design of CompanyCommand and PlatoonLeader.  Virtual communities exist for numerous Army specialties on the BCKS, but none are as successful at recruiting members or generating knowledge as MilSpace.  After reading about the success of CompanyCommand, the Navy and Air Force contacted the founders and developed their own websites.  The Air Force website even took screen shots from CompanyCommand and merely changed the content and color scheme.  Neither branch has witnessed the success of MilSpace. 

            The Company Command team is instrumental in extracting knowledge from the community of practice: the men and women engaging in military operations on a daily basis.  Junior officers are constantly using the tactics, techniques, and procedures taught to them through a variety of military institutions: ROTC, West Point, the basic officer leader course, professional development programs, training exercises, etc.  What are the outcomes of their employment of these concepts in the real world?  An officer can share the answer to this question on MilSpace, or with a member of the CompanyCommand team who then spreads the results throughout the community. 

            Once this new knowledge has been created, the CCL is effective at distributing it beyond the on-line community.  Kilner and Burgess have both deployed overseas multiple times to interview junior officers and share their results within MilSpace and throughout the military.  In one example, the CCL created a list of the ten most important concerns of company commanders.  The Center for Army Lessons Learned called the CCL and asked if it had any documents that could address the concerns, and then assigned a team to develop an answer for the others.  The CCL takes raw data and puts it in publishable form, serving as a catalyst to generate new knowledge.

            Kilner says, “We’ll ask a priority question, such as ‘How small is too small?’  We know we need outposts in a counterinsurgency battle; you don’t want big FOBs [forward operating bases], but at what size are you putting your people at unacceptable risk?  We identify a priority issue, craft a question, and invite people who have opinions to get it seeded.  We take some of the best responses and publish them in an Army Magazine article.  Once things go out in print they take on a life of their own.” 

            The technology of Company Command enables skilled officers to share their knowledge with peers in a way that was previously impossible. The CCL directors intend to maintain their presence within the community and continue the positive growth and knowledge distribution.  As Kilner says, “They’ll go where they meet their information needs and where there are relationships that they care about.”  Kilner and Burgess intend to facilitate the MilSpace community so that it remains such a place for an ever-growing group of young officers.

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