The social networking revolution

David Lavenda writes on the proliferation of social networking tools in the workplace

The way people interact is radically changing. 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. With its decision to expose developer APIs, Facebook has leapfrogged other popular social networking tools to become the pre-eminent social networking platform. As of February 2008, Facebook had 66 million subscribers and it was adding new subscribers at the rate of 250,000 per day. Notably, the single largest growing Facebook demographic is people over the age of 25. These are people who typically spend their waking hours in the corporate world. So it is no surprise that the social networking buzz is extending to the enterprise.

According to Facebook official records, many organisational personnel are already subscribers - for example, 30,000 employees from Microsoft, 33,000 employees from IBM, and 20,000 employees from Accenture. 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.' And what companies can afford these kinds of mistakes today?

Yet, as consumer services like Facebook find their way into the enterprise, companies are wary of the risks. 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% from a year before; Facebook logged over 100 million, up 305%.
• 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 October 2007, UK internet visits to social networks overtook visits to web-based email services.

The social forces driving change in the consumer computing world are also impacting the way business gets done. But business introduces some additional and unique forces and needs, which include the following:

• a need to make distributed and time-independent personnel communicate in a practical and reliable way
• a need to find, access, and share information faster
• a desire to leverage contacts and content in more effective ways
• a need to improve employee satisfaction in order to retain the best employees
• a need to improve productivity in order to remain competitive
• a need to reduce expenses.

Furthermore, the positive home-user experience is driving employees to clamour for:

• more interactive, intuitive and user-friendly tools for using applications and information systems
• simplified communications and collaboration between employees, customers and business partners
• a customised and personalised user experience - Gartner predicts that by 2015 people will customise 90% of the information, tools, education and technological resources they use at work, at home, for leisure and for entertainment.

Some of the difficult challenges facing organisations, who want to leverage the power of consumer social networking services in the enterprise, include the following:

• 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.

For these reasons, picking the most appropriate tools and services brings up some difficult choices. Consumer social networking software solutions are available, but cost, maintenance issues, and adoption difficulties make these solutions impractical for most organisations to implement. As a senior executive at a large corporation said, 'We could never keep up with what the free consumer services are giving away. Adopting and implementing them would be a losing battle.' Therefore, adopting consumer services offers the most promise (employees are already using them anyway), but consumer services are not enterprise-grade.

According to leading analysts, the introduction of consumer applications into the workplace by employees to improve productivity or better manage their personal and professional workloads is in its infancy. Yet even in this early stage, use of consumer services in the enterprise is quite extensive. According to a recent Yankee Group study, 86% of corporate end users (not IT executives) already use at least one consumer technology in the workplace.

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 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 lookalike 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 spaces 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 consumerisation of IT is a trend that is irreversible. Trying to fight it is futile. Gartner goes as far as to predict 'that those that attempt to fight consumerisation will sink into irrelevance'. For those who 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 consumerisation 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 social networking solutions are available, but their implementations have largely failed because people want to reach the contacts already existing on social networking sites. But they now want to do this securely using Web 2.0 technology.

David Lavenda is vice-president of marketing and product strategy, WorkLight.