The social enterprise today
As we are working to bring web 2.0 and the social web deep into our company using social websites, blogs, wiki’s and other hip stuff, it seems that this trend is indeed sticking and bigger companies (enterprises) are also doing this.
At least, that is what a study by Forrester says (Dutch link, sorry). For us that is kind of a *duh*. But apparently not so for for other small companies. Most are doing nothing. Well ; the companies themselves are not; ofcourse their employees are using Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, Hyves and others to communicate with everyone, but the companies are not yet going for it.
SaaS providers are taking steps and getting followers ofcourse; take 37signals; they have web 2.0 and social products that are used by a lot of small (and medium sized?) companies.
When this trend continues, I am wondering what enterprises will use. What software will they employ to make this social revolution a reality.
Apparently IBM Lotus Connections is very popular, but there are more players on the market. For instance BEA has a suite of products called Aqualogic Interaction. And there are more, smaller web 2.0 players, and bigger players like Google who are trying to sell SaaS social nets into the enterprise.
Considering the large success of Lotus in this space and the push BEA is trying to make there, it seems that the big ones see at least a bright future there. For installed systems. Within the company.
With the many profiles users already have outside their company and the many pictures, videos, friends etc they have connected to that, is it not time to integrate instead of getting something new and secluded going? If you have Linkedin and Linkedin has an API and offers ‘private’ groups for companies, is it not more logical to offer Linkedin for your employees and integrate, via the API, parts of Linkedin into your enterprise portal?
Ofcourse it is, but most companies, and worse, most IT systems, are not ready for this kind of change. It means giving your entire company employee file to a SaaS provider.
Although there are disadvantages to this though, the future will make many of them moot. For instance the pain of registering at yet another system, making another profile and so on; most of this can be taken away by using OpenID and it’s sistersystems for profiles. More and more companies are supporting their way of working.
Privacy concerns can be more or less taken away by (obviously) being more open, but as that is not an option for most companies, a mix between an internal portal, an extranet and an external community would be mostly perfect. This issue is the strongest and, as the mixing of internal/external communities becomes an important part of a company strategy, I am curious to see how it evolves. We haven’t figured it out for our company yet, but we should soon imho.
The advantages are, on the other hand, quite obvious; information sharing across companies (and even competitors) might seem strange, but, like a Star Trek utopia, it can be done. Another advantage is attracting new employees and also seeing what they are in fact ‘worth’. Hiring good people becomes a lot easier when this person has ratings in LinkedIn, blogs on Blogspot, projects on Sourceforge etc.
Social networks in the enterprise are here to stay, but in what form is worth a lot of discussion. At least it will involve some kind of portal system and standards around such a system, at least that is our firm believe. I am wondering if anyone besides Forrester gave it some thought yet 