The social networking movement of the last half-decade has widely been seen as a consumer focused movement. However, with the consumerization of IT, we are starting to see consumer oriented tools, including social networking being used in a corporate setting. This brings up a fascinating question, what does the future of social look like inside the enterprise? Will employees be able to find five Turkish-speaking engineers in their company in the same way they can easily locate 100 fans of their favorite band in their hometown today? Will these internal networks break down the organizational barriers inherent in many large organizations? Will they allow easier and more natural collaboration between historically distinct departments like marketing and IT? We already know that many employees are unhappy with the current state of corporate collaboration tools. Today, 26% of all workers think email is overused in their organizations, 21% felt overwhelmed by it and 15% felt that it actually diminished their productivity. Additionally, only 44% of respondents agreed that it was easy to find what they were looking for on their organization’s intranet. This compares to 87% for users conducting personal searches on popular consumer oriented search engines like Google and Bing. (Forrester Research)
While there is much work to be done, many corporations already have the foundation for a robust social platform. With simple algorithms and the data derived email, calendars, IM usage, corporations can construct a detailed social graph. The challenging part is deciding what information and tools to make available to employees. How can the data derived from the social graph be useful, without being intrusive or cumbersome?
While there are still many challenges to overcome before social networking within the enterprise becomes widespread, we believe the concept will transform the way employees work, communicate and collaborate. Adoption rates will vary by industry and organization; some organizations are already using proprietary in-house tools or public services such as Salesforce.com’s Chatter or Jive, while others won’t adopt anything for years to come. Whatever way you look at it, this movement is still in its infancy, the platforms need refining and the usage cases are still evolving, but the groundwork and experimentation that is happening today will support the groundbreaking enterprise centric, social networks of the future.