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.

As of February 2008, Facebook had 66m subscribers and 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.

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

    To fit within the protected “walled garden” nature of corporate environments, these services, technologies and tools need to incorporate “enterprise class” services

  • 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 customized and personalized user experience - Gartner predicts that by 2015 people will customize 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

Consumer social networking software solutions are available, but cost, maintenance issues, and adoption difficulties make these solutions impractical for most organisations to implement. 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. 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

David Lavenda is VP marketing and product strategy at WorkLight