For decades the enterprise tried to create various forms of yellow pages for employees. This models was flawed from the beginning. It was never successful. The problem is that employee data must be controlled by employees to be useful. Social media are created by employees.

Overzealous personnel and HR people tried building a central monolith of employee data for broad access. It often included consultants, temporary workers, applicants, suppliers and the myriad other roles required in the modern enterprise. It was maintained and operated by HR staffers. Some ambitious people called it the knowledge management system (KMS). Wow!

This de facto enterprise personnel directory was used for ever expanding tasks. The links to the official HR database for payroll, benefits, pension, etc. were murky, varied and problematic. Maintaining basic HR information for payroll is hard enough. Adding and expanding the all-important constellations of roles and social networks was well beyond the capability of HR or the enterprise. Many efforts were abandoned or fell into disuse and misuse.

Grave and serious HR and legal problems arose from these poorly maintained data. They were used for key tasks like succession planning, job placement, compensation and so forth. Whenever an employee was upset about the outcome of a HR process, they could pinpoint the blame on faulty data in the expanded HR database. It was a mess…

While it didn’t solve all these problems, LinkedIn and other user-controlled social media did create a new and far more productive HR information ecology. See: 4381 & 10^8.