After my presentation at last month’s Web Essentials event hosted by Library House I was asked whether I thought Facebook would be widely adopted as a social networking platform inside the enterprise. This is an interesting question as it touches on the different underlying requirements for consumer and enterprise applications. Facebook is currently getting strong adoption from business folk, something that MySpace and Friendster never achieved. Last week Siemens’ inhouse web strategist disclosed that 6,000 of Siemens’ employees were already on Facebook and most of them had joined during the previous month. This led Robert Scoble to suggest that the company might soon be producing dedicated apps for the platform and that in time Facebook could even replace Siemens’ intranet.
Facebook as a replacement for the corporate intranet? It’s an intriguing thought, but I think Mr Scoble is wrong on this. There are three main barriers:
Insufficient Security and Privacy Options
Part of Facebook’s triumph is its simple (but subtle) permissions system. As a user I can choose whether my profile page is visible to everyone or just my friends. Groups can be open to everyone, their content can be restricted to members or they can be completely invisible. I can also associate a group with a network such as a school or business. People can easily grasp these authorisation options and they offer enough range to cover most social preferences. However they don’t offer the level of granularity or sophistication needed for serious enterprise usage. Businesses have a wide variety of security and privacy policies and every internal system needs conform to them 100%. There’s no margin for error or compromise where highly sensitive information is concerned. Security and privacy are peripheral functions for a consumer platform they are absolutely central for an enterprise platform.
Too Reliant on Manual Updating
Facebook, in common with other consumer social networking platforms, relies on manually entered data to build up a picture of who your friends are and what you’re interested in. This works fine for social purposes, where updating profiles and friend lists becomes a leisure activity in its own right. But this isn’t true in the enterprise. Systems that rely on manual updating (such as knowledge management tools based on tagging) tend to deliver limited value in the enterprise for the simple reason that people never get round to updating them. To deliver sustained value, enterprise social networking platforms must have automatic mechanisms to update themselves and maintain an accurate picture of people’s networks and interests.
No Integration with Enterprise Systems
Enabling third-party developers to write plug-ins (or “Apps”) for Facebook has made a huge contribution to its success. My Facebook page includes a random selection of my photos imported from my Flickr account, details of the artists I’ve been listening to on LastFM (with a button to play my personal radio station) and links to the last six entries from my personal blog. It’s easy for Facebook to link with other consumer platforms like this because they all share simple authorisation models and the data being exchanged isn’t sensitive. However the sources an enterprise needs to integrate with, such as their corporate email system and document repository, hold extremely sensitive material and have sophisticated authorisation regimes that must stringently be adhered to. This isn’t what Facebook was designed for.
These issues don’t mean that Facebook has no role in business. Far from it. I think Facebook could well replace dedicated business networking services such as LinkedIn. Indeed I’ve already made a number of valuable business connections through Facebook. But the very factors that underlie Facebook’s success in the consumer world limit its application inside the enterprise. If it had been designed for enterprise needs it wouldn’t be seeing such wide adoption in the consumer world. In the end it’s horses for courses.
August 28th, 2007 at 4:53 pm
“It is not farfetched to consider Facebook as an example of the future of enterprise knowledge management. Its personalization and collaborative filtering features may be at an early stage, but its platform strategy makes clear that its members view the world as a continuous stream of written information and social interactions. This infrastructure for scalable information routing is one of the most broadly used publish/subscribe applications in the world.”
Rohit Khare, Co-founder of KnowNow is trying to pimp off FaceBook with an epiphany he calls “Syndication-Oriented Architecture” (SynOA)’ .SynOA guides a wide range of services that can better manage information overload into five layers of increasingly sophisticated capabilities: Publication, Subscription, Distribution, Personalization, and Collaboration blah, blah, blah….