Enterprise resistance to social networking typical, can be overcome
I worked for a newspaper a decade ago where a reporter, of his own volition, set up a wi-fi network in the newsroom. We loved it but when corporate found out about it, they shut it off, believing our competitors would park outside our office and see what stories we were working on. Sigh.
In the past, bosses resisted e-mail, instant messaging and smartphones for the same short-sighted reasons. No doubt, Roger Sterling and Bert Cooper looked askance when a copier the size of an aircraft carrier was wheeled into the offices of Sterling Cooper during the first season of “Mad Men,” set in 1960. Now, it’s unthinkable that we could do our jobs without such technology.
But the pattern is repeating itself with social networking in the enterprise. It’s a time waster, proprietary information about the company could be leaked and there are liability risks. But the protagonists of social media in business at the Enterprise 2.0 conference held this week in Santa Clara, Calif., including those from Microsoft, declared that an inflection point has been reached and that the advantages of “social business,” as one put it, to the enterprise far outweigh the risks, which can be managed. But as one attendee told another, “We’ve seen this movie before.”
“We’re about providing real time, unified communications as a social layer across all the productivity apps that people use,” said Christian Finn, director for collaboration and enterprise social computing at Microsoft, who sat on a panel with his peers from newly-minted social business players such as IBM and Cisco, as well as from Jive Software, a social business software company. Collaboration software, such as Microsoft’s SharePoint and its Unified Communications platform, together deliver a “dial tone infrastructure,” Finn said, onto which a social business offering can be added.
A marketing executive from software company Saba demonstrated for me its Saba Live social business collaboration tool with a user interface modeled after that of Facebook. Another company, BroadVision, introduced a new version of its Clearvale software for delivering enterprise social networking. IBM introduced Lotus Connections 3.0, which adds social business to its collaboration platform for its Lotus business software suite.
“It’s not Facebook in the enterprise,” said Larry Bowden, vice president of portals and Web experience software for Big Blue. “Facebook is unbounded [and] there isn’t risk management per se.”
Social business in the enterprise carries with it the same expectations of behavior elsewhere in business, Bowden said. You don’t share proprietary information outside of work in an e-mail, a fax or a phone call. You don’t talk about business in an elevator if there are strangers in the car. Such precautions have been taught to employees for years.
“There are adults inside companies … who are following those guidelines,” he said. To be sure, however, there are security and privacy features built into social business products from IBM, Microsoft and others to enforce such policies.
While vendors touted the benefits of social business at the conference and it’s growing popularity, Microsoft’s Finn added a note of caution. He mentioned a Gartner study from July that reported that it may be two years before social networking technology gains any serious foothold in the enterprise. When companies considered new technology, features such as blogs, social networking or social tagging “had the highest rejection rates of between 5 percent to 7 percent of respondents,” Gartner stated, and that about an equal number haven’t even considered them. Gartner surmised that they were rejected for reasons such as security or compliance issues, but also “a general inability to articulate clear business benefits.”
Asked how such reservations about social business jibe with the talk at the conference about it being the next big thing, Microsoft’s Finn didn’t hesitate before answering: “Because this is a social business hype fest.”
