Social Networking - Corporate Opportunity Or Threat?

By John Brownhill, Commercial Director, Symatrix.

On the face of it social networking could be just a waste of corporate time – staff “working” on matters which are of no concern or value to the organisation instead of doing what they are being paid for. But that is just on the face of it. In fact, although most Facebook and other networks’ usage is for non-working purposes commercial usage is growing fast, particularly in collaborative communities of interest and niche networking applications. And these are communities that formed organically and continue to thrive without official initiation, authorisation or management.

One of the most powerful aspects of social networks is the ability to provide nearly instantaneous connections to people that one knows only casually. Andrew McAfee of the Harvard Business School refers to this as the value of “allowing knowledge workers to maintain and exploit weak ties.”

Take a site such as LinkedIn, with its recommendation system for identifying people with similar work experience, when putting together a project team. LinkedIn is particularly proactive in its efforts to get users to extend and establish relationships outside existing networks. In a social enterprise, people outside a department or immediate work group could be connected with what others do, the people they interact with, and the projects they are working on. The ability to apply social network trends in business represents an opportunity to dramatically improve how we interact with colleagues for knowledge management, collaboration, and content creation – in short a social enterprise.

In this social enterprise communication becomes conversation. All employees participate in information creation, information consumption, and information sharing. To make this possible a social enterprise requires an open environment in which people and systems across the business work together and leverage each other’s skills and know-how. Pull systems emerge to complement the push systems over which IT exercises control. In many organisations, this will be an adjustment, particularly for IT. After putting social systems in place, IT must be willing to step aside so employees can choose the feeds, blogs, and wikis that they want to follow, as well as create their own applications. This “consumerisation” of IT is already happening in today’s enterprise; social applications are merely the next phase.

One caveat in this brave new world though – give some thought to security and commercial sensitivity in this open environment. A picture in a posing pouch was embarrassing for John Sawer as head of MI5; a list of his agents’ LinkedIn contact details would have been disastrous.

If you would like to discuss with Symatrix how to leverage collaboration tools and HR Portal technology in your UK organisation, please contact John Brownhill on +44 (0)1372 860 740 or email him at john.brownhill@symatrix.com.