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Noteworthy:
Social Networks in the Enterprise? |
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Part of the challenge of the Internet is to figure out where it is going next and how to assess the value that is available. What's next: Face Book on your office desktop? My Space on your company's intranet? Probably not, but Microsoft now provides a "My Sites" feature that includes personal private and public sites as part of its SharePoint Server 2007 package. IBM now offers Lotus® Connections which it describes as, "social software for business that empowers you to be more innovative and helps you execute more quickly by using dynamic networks of co-workers, partners and customers." In Web 1.0 the Internet was seen as an information source. In Web 2.0 it is a participation platform made up of Web-based communities and hosted services such as social-networking sites, wikis, and blogs. Users are now participants in the flow of information; they are both receivers and providers of information. Elements of Web 2.0 have been around since before the Internet. The most common applications were probably those known as "knowledge management." They were conceptually sound but often expensive to develop, cumbersome to use, and the size of their audience was so limited that most could not justify their cost. Web 2.0 applications now reach large audiences on the Internet and corporate intranets. The tools to build them are easier to use and they often take advantage of data that is already available with little of no effort such as financial data, operating statistics, corporate directories and the results of projects and research. The value is now greater and the costs are lower. Many of your younger employees are hooked on social networks and have the skills to use them. Facebook, My Space and their decedents provide new tools that have moved across the country and around the world. They are part of the world of your new employees. Are they part of the world of your enterprise?
Personal social networks are not the same as corporate social networks, but there are enough similarities that corporate developers can learn from the experience of personal networks. That experience suggests that the most likely targets are large corporations that are willing to support an evolutionary development process and have significant numbers of operating centers and projects that are geographically separated. The bane of every project manager is administrative overhead. Let's look as a few project related examples by way of illustration of the application of social networks. Every project with more than a few members needs a contact list. Start by allowing a project manager (PM) to click on the online corporate directory to add members to a list formatted to their needs and have the system automatically keep that information current. Add contributors, advisors and reviewers to the contact list by allowing the PM or a designated representative to copy and paste addresses from project email and then use those lists for the next round of email to those specific audiences. Provide the option for each employee to have their own page and to link it to their current project site (or sites) as they move from project-to-project. As new project members are added the team can quickly learn about them and they can learn about their new team. Peer pressure will encourage participation and keep material fresh. This personal information is particularly valuable where geography limits interaction to little more than conference calls and reviews of shared project deliverables. Shared work experiences, co-workers, and interests can facilitate trust and communication. Link to the payroll system and classify team members that are charging to the project, e.g., part-time and full-time, using some simple business rules. Give the PM a spreadsheet of names, time and dollars billed to his or her project to provide an additional level of project cost control. Tie that to a list of people who say on their own pages they are working on the project. Set up a site page for the project that briefly describes the project and includes objectives and high level time lines from the statement of work. Include the team members list, high level status reports, and recognition of jobs well done. Include job opening on the project for current employees and referrals for their friends; provide a two-way link to a central list of job openings. The project manager will keep the openings listed until he or she is satisfied they have the person they need and they will then close them to minimize any further distraction. That will go a long way to keeping the central list current and useful. Link employees to projects and incorporate their project experience and roles as part of their in-house resume. It will support career development and immediately answer questions like: That was a great project; who do we have available that worked on it? Encourage employees to expand on specific areas of expertise on their sites that will make them valuable to future projects including the business functions supported, systems used, tools, techniques, etc. A five minute search and a couple of phone calls should lead to just about any knowledge or skill resource that a project needs that exists within the company.
Social networks will evolve. There will be common threads across companies and different implementation strategies and features from company-to-company. The best road to success will be evolutionary using applications that are easy to use, take advantage of existing information, and provide some of the self-serving features of personal social networking. The evolution of social networks in corporations will reflect the interaction of changes in culture and technology; and it will be a process of discovery as much as one of development. Evolution has to be balanced with corporate security for intellectual property, compliance with legislation and regulations, discovery related to litigation, oversight to prevent misuse, and personal privacy in an age of identity theft. The mere ability to share more data will increase the need to manage what we need to sort through; think of spam filters to help manage the growing volume of email. Controls and security will have to be included in the implementation plan and evolve as rapidly as capabilities. Just when the capabilities for social networks within corporations are developing, Google and now Yahoo, Microsoft, and MySpace among others are joining forces to move the technology ahead. In the beginning email was platform specific; if you had AOL you couldn't send email to CompuServe. In the same way, if you have material on FaceBook today you can't move it to MySpace. The OpenSocial platform will make social-networking content as platform independent in the near future as email is today. As an example of that, an intra-company project social network will be technically able to link to consultants, vendors, suppliers and others in the extended enterprise. More risk and potentially more value. Facebook or My Space on your office computer? Probably not. Descendents tailor to the needs of the enterprise? Almost certainly. Now is a good time to start thinking about it.
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