Dan Hushon – CEO of CSC – is in theCUBE with John Furrier and Jeff Frick

Until not so long ago, communications between senior management and the broader workforce at global firms such as Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) only went one way, resulting in a rigid atmosphere that didn’t afford the rank and file an active voice in their work. The advent of social media opened up a channel for dialogue to flow in the opposite direction, but the potential for truly interactive conversation is only now beginning to materialize at the individual level.

CSC chief technology officer Dan Hushon recently returned to theCUBE (full video below) for the opportunity to share how CrowdChat is helping him and the rest of the top brass at the consultancy giant hurry along the journey towards making personal engagement practical on an organizational scale. The newly upgraded social container adds an entirely new dimension of granularity to the traditional user interaction formula, according to the executive, narrowing the lens to focus on the individual influencers who make up the broader picture of the business ecosystem while still staying in perspective.

“We’re able to reach far more people, both people who are employees but also customers and people who want to be customers and employees, engage them in conversation and use that to see whether they’re the right fit,” Hushon told SiliconANGLE founder John Furrier. That may appear straightforward enough given the exponential nature of the social sphere, but as CSC found out first hand, maintaining a productive conversation at the pace and scale of online networking is much easier said than done.

After recognizing the value of the real-time community input to be had from Twitter and other modern mediums, the company started running open discussions aimed at aggregating that insight in an organized format. The idea showed potential at first but proved more and more difficult to sustain as participation grew, Hushon recounted. One of the main challenges was keeping the discourse interactive across multiple time zones, which he said required the firm to spread sessions over different parts of the day. But that merely provided a bandaid solution to a fundamental functional problem.

Read more after the video.

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Taking a page from IBM Corp.’s book, CSC turned to CrowdChat to bring order to the social media chaos, quickly becoming a regular organizer of discussion streams. According to Hushon, the smart overlay has enabled the company to let suggestions flow freely from Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn while still maintaining a degree of structure that makes it possible to harness that input for commercial gain.

“Using CrowdChat allows us to engage a lot more people in the conversations, which means you’re gathering requirements from a lot more customers and employees, you’re able to focus and you have the transcript, so you have the record for all that,” Hushon detailed. “And then as you begin to move forward by doing it transparency you have greater engagement downstream as well.”

Even more important than the fact it can engage customers and partners more interactively is the fact CSC now has insight into the underlying factors driving the conversation, he added. That visibility makes it possible for the company to trace complaints and sentiment changes to the source, identify the root cause and adjust accordingly based on the real-time conditions.

“For us what’s important is the engagement models,” Hushon elaborated. “Anytime you’re trying to affect change, what you’re trying to figure out is who are the influencers. So by being able to see who’s engaged around what, where the sweet spots are and who they’re engaging with, you begin to peel back the onion and recognize how the Big Data is incredibly rich.”

That knowledge-driven approach has proven so effective that CSC is now actively working on applying the methodology in its core systems integration operations, Hushon continued. He explained that the ability to aggregate information about the diverse components that make up an IT environment and assembling the individual data points into a complete view of the infrastructure landscape provides an invaluable boost for productivity.

“By putting our analytics on top, we’re able to find brand new insights about systems, why they’re not working, how much they cost to operate, which systems are integrated that we didn’t know are integrated and other difficult question,” he concluded.