Social media is all about people and information. I'm a firm believer that a company is made up of only four resources: financial assets that sit on the balance sheet; physical "stuff", such as computers, desks and buildings; information; and people.

And there's a limit to what you can do with the first two. We may have financial assets, but so do our rivals. As to the physical assets, my carpets aren't any smarter than the carpets over at the competition's offices. When it comes down to it, the only two things we get to leverage are our people and our information.

We need effective people - those who will play as a team and get the job done. But when we find them, that's not an end to the matter.One of the issues that plagues companies - particularly big companies - is what I call un-innovation.

That's when you find out that teams from different regions are busy solving the same problem in six different ways, spending time on analysis, design and architecture, and delivering solutions in parallel - unknown to each other and at enormous cost to the company.

My people in York aren't going to bump into my people in Paris; my people in Des Moines don't go for coffee with my people in Shanghai. So I had to think about how I could get them tied together, how they could work with each other to become more innovative. Effectively, I had to let them bump into each other digitally, so they could meet up and say, "You know what? We solved that problem last year - here's how you do it."

When an insurance company talks about "Web 2.0 inside the enterprise", it can sound a bit jarring. It's the kind of phrase you expect to hear from the high-tech guys in Silicon Valley.

But we've done it at Aviva. We've created a multi-layered system comprising knowledge management, intranet, social networking and collaboration. We're breaking the mould: it's a social networking platform in a 300-year-old insurance company - with all the sophisticated content management that goes behind it.

Integrated approaches

Let me give you an example. We currently have a frontline team of people who've come together from different areas of the company to improve one of our key processes. They have refined a process that previously involved 33 different people, with different hand-offs, down to one that involves two people, reducing the cycle time from 48 days to just 18 days.

The Web 2.0 platform helped the group by enabling it to function with minimal management interference, empowering them to create their own answers to tough problems. Without the social networking platform, they might never have met at all - they might have remained in their own teams, all of them working on the same issue and coming up with different, possibly less effective solutions.

My belief about IT is - and I learned this from my time in the technology start-up world - that small and agile kills big and slow. I think our approach to knowledge management means we're on the path to becoming big and agile. If we can do that, we'll kill our sluggish competition.

Do you agree? Have your say by commenting below. And for a contrasting point of view see Part 2 of this debate, by Anthony Bradley, managing VP at Gartner Research.