Getting social in the workplace
As the social networking bandwagon gains pace, IT departments are trying to determine whether Internet-based solutions such as Facebook and MySpace are security risks to be managed or an inevitability to be accepted.
Research company Gartner says there is no guarantee that deployment of a corporate social networking solution will be successful, even if there is already a solid base of employees using sites such as Facebook. It adds, however, that corporate social networking solutions are generally good products and offer some security advantages over Internet-based social networking sites.
Ultimately, the value of social networking resides in content and not the product. Nikos Drakos, an analyst at Gartner, says the advantage of a social networking solution over the standard company intranet is that the former is controlled by the enduser.
“Intranets have become centralised and are controlled by management. Social software platforms, however, have the individual as the starting point.”
Intranets are used to post policy statements and updates; they are about communicating with the users, and users cannot respond.
Social networking sites, however, allow for the free flow of information, which can have important spin-offs for the company. Groups of people separated geographically can be united via the platform and work on a project together.
Innovation, for example, often relies on the chance combination of otherwise unrelated ideas. A team of engineers working in Cape Town can communicate with another team in Durban to solve a problem.
What’s more, says Drakos, all the communication between the teams will be available to others. Chats over the coffee machine may hold great promise, but they cannot be kept and filed like “conversations” on the social networking site. However, the system does raise privacy issues — but its transparency can also be its protection.
If users know that everything will be available to everyone in the company, they will need to be careful about how they use it. To get the most out of the system, e-mail patterns also need to be analysed, Drakos says.
“If you look at e-mail patterns, you can visualise the way in which people communicate; who has been talking to whom.”
With this map of communication, you can see where to go to find information about a particular client, supplier or product. This map can be further enhanced by adding information about what users have bookmarked on the web — but can the information be trusted?
“With an open and transparent platform, you do need to be concerned about the quality of information and the abuse of the platform, though there are practical ways to deal with these issues.”
Drakos recommends a staggered introduction, beginning with groups where trust exists and then slowing spreading it.
“Policies will be there to guide usage, but companies must also develop social norms of what is acceptable. It must evolve slowly, with participation from management and staff.”
Not all companies have leapt at the opportunity to launch a corporate social network. “Some are keener than others,” says Drakos, adding that it is often the IT departments that are most sceptical.
They want to know about the architecture, standards, tools and viability, whereas the CEO is eager to reap the benefits, he says. Companies’ responses to sites such as Facebook have been varied and some have chosen to ban staff from accessing the sites.
Corporate social networking, on the other hand, allows companies to benefit from the immediacy of it, where employees use it for work rather than social purposes. But it needs to be handled with care.
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