Proliferation of social networking tools has changed the way people keep in touch and organisations cannot escape their influence. But how can organisations across sector harness these tools to enhance their productivity? David Lavenda lays out a plan.
The way people interact is radically changing. In fact, we are in the midst of a social networking revolution which impacts both our personal and professional lives. Hardly a day goes by without a new article announcing some aspect of how our lives are changing due to the proliferation of consumer services such as Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, and a host of others. This impact is also felt in organisations, both private and public.
So important is the impact of social networking tools, that a recent Gartner report concludes, "The failure to consider the impact of social enhancement technology on the performance of the enterprise is a big mistake." But how are organisations to address this new technology?
As consumer services like Facebook find their way into the enterprise, companies are wary of the risks and are looking for a way to set appropriate boundaries. A recent Forrester survey found that 78% of IT organisations are concerned about the risks of employee-driven, unsanctioned use of Web 2.0 tools and technologies. ”The primary reason is that social networking tools and services (like other Web 2.0 services and technologies), were designed to work in what Gartner calls "global-class environments" which implies open and highly scalable deployments. In order to fit within the protected "walled garden" nature of corporate environments, these services, technologies, and tools need to incorporate "enterprise class" services, such as security, access control, and auditing, before they can become pervasive within the corporate world.
Social networking tools are taking the world by storm. Thomas Friedman, in The World is Flat lists social networking or what he calls "communities collaborating on online projects"—as the most disruptive force "flattening the world." Some indicators that support this view include the following:
- MySpace logged 110 million unique visitors in January 2008, up 15 percent from a year before; Facebook logged over 100 million, up 305 percent.
- Facebook’s unique audience in the UK grew by over 7 million in one year – from about 1 million in January 2007 to over 8.5 million in 2008 That’s an unrivalled growth rate of 712% in a single year, making the UK second only to the United States in the number of active Facebook active users.
- For the first time, in Oct 2007, UK Internet visits to social networks overtook visits to web based email services.
Faced with this groundswell, organisations must be prepared to address the following challenges and introduce appropriate governance guidelines:
- Security – organisations are concerned about the exposure of internal business systems to external entities. Information that should be under tight control may be publicly exposed, either accidentally or intentionally.
- Control – going forward, organisations need to decide what to share, how to share and when to share. The conventional wisdom has always been that controlling information is better than sharing it.
- Lack of integration of social software with other tools used by employees. The need to move back and forth between multiple applications and separate windows is what IDC calls "death by navigation." The business cost of death by navigation is extraordinary.
- Trust and privacy – concerns and unease with new methods for interacting with (unknown) contacts.
It is inevitable that employees will introduce services that will increasingly expose their organisations to greater integration and security threats. In fact, an informal Gartner poll found that nearly 50% of respondents "customise their work environment moderately or aggressively" (including the use of unsanctioned tools) and will continue to do so. By 2015, Gartner predicts that the future worker will "take a higher degree of control over their work environment and pulling the information, sources and tools when and where they need them, without restriction.
Today, organisations typically adopt one or more of the following approaches:
- Raise the drawbridges – forbid the use of consumer technologies in the workplace. According to the aforementioned Yankee Group study, 35% of end users report that their IT department blocked the use of a third-party collaboration tool.
- Ignore the phenomenon – do nothing to prevent or guide use of consumer technologies in the workplace. A prime example is the use of instant messaging tools at work. In the Yankee Group study, 65% of respondents report that their adoption of unsanctioned collaboration tools has gone unchecked by IT. This is probably the most widely adopted (and most dangerous) approach in effect today.
- Provide enterprise “look-a-like” equivalents of consumer services – with this approach, companies try to introduce enterprise-grade software and services to "compete" with consumer tools. Some examples include company home pages, instant messaging tools, and social networking software. Attempts to adopt these "private collaboration space" have – for the most part – failed.
- Permit (and even encourage) limited use of consumer tools, subject to corporate policies. This is the most forward-looking policy, though it is not yet widely adopted. The bottom line is that consumerization of IT is a trend that is irreversible. Trying to fight it is futile. Gartner goes as far to predict "that those that attempt to fight consumerization will sink into irrelevance." For those that still doubt the impact of this trend, one only has to consider what happened to companies that ignored the Internet.
Social networking is an irreversible mega-trend. As part of the "IT consumerization" wave, social networking is permeating organisational boundaries, with or without corporate blessing. Organisations can either ignore this trend (at their peril) or develop a strategy to leverage the trend to be more successful. Commercial enterprise social networking products are available, but their implementations have largely failed because people want to reach the their existing contacts (from social networking sites), however they now want to do this securely using Web 2.0 technology. The key to success is to combine the best the Internet has to offer with corporate security mechanisms. A tall order to be sure, but this combination will unlock the potential of the Internet so that corporate social networking can help fulfill the business goals of the organization.