Businesspeople Asleep at the Wheel on the Value of Social Networking
Ask the average manager or executive if they’d welcome Facebook into the workplace, and they’ll say, "Are you nuts?!" But Serena Software got some press last month when it declared “Facebook Fridays.” The company’s 800 employees in 18 countries were encouraged to spend one hour each Friday on their Facebook profiles, connecting with co-workers, customers, family and friends.
A few days ago, Bill Ives wrote in the Fast Forward blog that Serena is actually going much further than that, replacing its corporate intranet with “Facebook as a front end linked to a low-cost content management system behind the firewall.” Now, part of this is certainly good PR for Serena – after all, they’re in the Web 2.0 software space. But the fact is, Facebook provides an engaging experience, it’s free, it’s easy to write custom apps on top of it, and you can set up both private and public groups. Why not?
Harvard prof Andrew McAfee (credited with coining the term Enterprise 2.0) thinks the “why not” may have to do with IT executives viewing Web 2.0 technologies as a threat to their fiefdoms. In an article titled “Enterprise 2.0 May Be Fine for the Business, but What About the IT Department?" McAfee wonders if IT departments “consciously exclude outsiders and outside influences, and are concerned primarily with expanding themselves. If this is the case, then Enterprise 2.0 will certainly be resisted by IT; its tools are cheap, often housed outside the firewall, and require relatively little configuration, support, and maintenance. Enterprise 2.0 comes from outside the priesthood, in other words, and doesn’t expand the empire.”
That’s harsh. After all, IT has plenty of good reasons to be cautious when it comes to introducing new technologies inside the enterprise. Who knows what might be lurking in all those Facebook widgets? But there’s also a kernel of truth in what McAfee says. Too many IT professionals dismiss the unproven in the name of defending enterprise integrity. The question is, what good’s the integrity of your ship if your engine’s gone out and you’re dead in the water?
Maybe you’re not ready to welcome Facebook into the enterprise yet. Your business colleagues probably aren’t either. But there are other ways to start taking advantage of Web 2.0 technologies, and lots of compelling reasons to do so (I’ll write more about this in my next post).
Previous Post: IT Operational Excellence Is Table Stakes (Or, Get Out of the Server Room...Next Post: The Evangelist in You
Most Discussed Posts
Cloud computing has emerged as one of the most significant game changers to hit the technology landscape in the past 20 years. With this massive expansion of the cloud, the perception of the IT organization is shifting from a utility player to a change agent. This eBook breaks down five ways progressive organizations are using cloud-based IT Management solutions to help drive innovation and become more strategic, including: adding visibility and analytics, speeding up time-to-value, lowering costs, improving prioritization, and providing a blueprint for future cloud deployments.
Read the white paper to see how IBM helped Citigroup deliver new services and enhancements to their 200 million customers faster.
There are 3 ways to modernize legacy applications: rewrite completely, acquire packaged solutions or migrate existing code. This paper explains why it's best to migrate and how IBM® Rational® software can help.
Accommodating specific lines of business can result in a hybrid ecosystem of applications and servers. The resulting complexity of this architecture makes for an environment that is costly to maintain and difficult to change when addressing new challenges.
This whitepaper will help you to define a mobile device passcode policy. Security managers must attempt to reconcile two opposing goals. They must: 1) create a passcode policy that is strong enough to protect the device if it is lost or stolen, while: 2) not annoying users with needless length or complexity.
This whitepaper, authored by The Radicati Group, looks at the key reasons organizations should consider moving to a cloud-based archiving solution. Email archiving solutions enable organizations to store, monitor, and collect electronic data exchanged by their users to comply with internal policies and regulations.
ATERNITY will showcase a 30-minute demo on how Fortune 500 companies are leveraging its award-winning FPI Platform to deliver a user-centric approach to Proactive IT Management.
For businesses to move forward and tap into the ever-expanding universe of Internet users and network-enabled devices, it's critical to learn how to make the transition to IPv6. Learn the critical steps your organization must take to make a seamless transition-and keep your business world connected.
Learn how IT teams can protect against spear phishing tactics. Harry Sverdlove, chief technology officer of Bit9 offers a frank discussion about spear phishing - the most common technique used in today's advanced attacks.
Learn how to build a solid business case for your migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux so you can run leaner, innovate faster, be more flexible and own the New Now.
Social media isn't about you; it's about everything around you. As you consider how your customers want to communicate with you, social media is something that can't be ignored. But what should your strategy be? Is social media "just another channel?" What kind of a plan makes sense for your contact center and for your customers? Join our experts as they share their insight and research results.
Hardware tokens were a popular method of strong authentication in past years but the cumbersome provisioning and distribution tasks, high support requirements and replacement costs have limited their growth. The additional log-in steps that hardware tokens require and the resulting user frustrations have limited adoption and make them impractical for larger scale partner and customer applications.
Sponsored Links
