Blog | Archive for the ‘Organisations & Technology’ Category

Marketing and morals: No woman is an island?

By rebecca | Tuesday, May 6th, 2008

In which a sticker not only ignites the latent inner arts critic of your correspondent. It arouses her rampant, explicit feminist.

One of the four or five women I spoke to on the Web 2.0 Expo floor declined a “No man is an island” sticker with the rebuttal “I’m a woman.” I was dumbstruck, a rare occurrence when discussing Trampoline. Why did this matter so much to me?

First, it was a failure of a piece of work I’d done. That hurts. We created a material with which to engage people, and on this occasion it failed. A small minority of our target audience, admittedly, but it still sucks.

Now the second, overwhelming reason. I often ponder the disconnect between my personal and professional codes of conduct. On occasion the space between them is wider than I’d like, sometimes I am pleased by their convergence. Critics might argue that I should just be myself at all times – especially seen as Trampoline is meant to be an easy-going, do as you please type workplace, or be 100% corporate automaton – but that doesn’t fit here either. I do find the conflation of, or discrepancy between, work and personal behaviours interesting and a helpful lens at work: hardball for women, anyone? In fact, a core principle of Trampoline’s technology is that personal and work behaviours aren’t that dissimilar.

My current method is to push until I’m blue in the face about matters related to work on which I believe comment necessary. So I emit a constant mantra of “hire women, hire women” and try to call people out when they say something I consider offensive or derogatory to women. That’s because I believe having a woman-positive workplace is vital and that women-positive workplaces aren’t formed without effort from all involved.

But I am careful. I would hate anyone telling me to vote Boris (off topic, but it was very dispiriting to return from a Portland, Oregon so full of optimism for Obama, to a London run by the abhorrent Boris Johnson) so I in return I don’t ask anyone to sign petitions against the reduction of the time limit for legal abortion proposed in the amendments to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill. I would love it if you did, though. And besides, my begging quota is most effectively used at work for work stuff.

The Web 2.0 Expo stickers didn’t always bear the legend No Man is an Island. We mocked up an early version which read No man (or woman) is an island.

We nuked this version because:

a) it didn’t look clean enough

b) women were still an afterthought

c) it’s not a real quote

d) Donne’s habit of woman as land metaphor has always pained me

e) we’ve got the sisterhood, right?

I like to think that if we had used this version, the woman would have accepted the sticker. But, perhaps ironically, I still wouldn’t change it.

The use of he/she, man/woman is one crux of my personal and professional conduct conflict. I use “she”, rather than “he”, always in my personal life. In work, I try to use “she” first, then “he”. I don’t like “he” as a catch all but I’m not sure it’s right to use “she” throughout as our audience is primarily men and I don’t want to undermine the good impression Trampoline makes through a writing style that could alienate them. My compromise is to put women first. We’ve been second for too long. Incidentally, I encountered the only drop-down list of titles in online shopping I’ve ever seen at work. It was on Sainsbury’s supermarket. Depressing, much?

Moral of the story? I am glad that woman called Trampoline out and I wish I had an answer for her. Speaking up is always better than remaining quiet. At Portland airport on Sunday I saw a woman with a canvas bag that read “Speak your mind – even if your voice shakes”. These words are from Maggie Kuhn, founder of the Grey Panthers. I will now decline from the opportunity for a rounded, cosy “together we can change the world” conclusion. I’m not convinced it’s that easy, but I’d be pleased if you inferred that logic and acted accordingly.

Posted in Organisations & Technology | 2 Comments »

No Man is an Island, John Donne (1624) and enterprise social computing, Trampoline Systems (2008)

By rebecca | Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008

Rarely is one presented with a delicious opportunity to delve into the connections between stickers produced last week, a metaphysical poet from the early 17th Century and the concerns of enterprise social computing. Trampoline is the only workplace on earth I can imagine that occurring. An unhealthy obsession with correct spelling aside, this is the first time I have used my English degree in my career. You have been warned.

Let’s begin with stickers. Trampoline has a batch of them, rapidly depleting and strewn between London, Seattle and San Francisco; a gingerbread trail for wandering Tramponauts. They’ll mostly be encountered at Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco this week. Find them and us at booth 629 where we’re being kindly hosted by Oracle. Perhaps you already have, and that’s why you’re here. In which case, make yourself at home.

We had to put something on our stickers. Various ideas were batted around, particularly single words relating to our technology and the world of enterprise social computing. Not bad, but nothing that would achieve our main aim of people liking or identifying with the stickers enough to put one on their laptop. In a flash of inspiration, spurred on by copious cups of tea, I remembered the phrase “no man is an island”. We went with it and a mutated version of our logo.

I was prompted to look at the origins of the phrase and found it belonged to John Donne, a favourite of mine in my late teens. (Don’t laugh, I just love poems.) Here’s the text:

No man is an island entire of itself; every man
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe
is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as
well as any manner of thy friends or of thine
own were; any man’s death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

Or, as Donne himself had it, and as I prefer:

No man is an Iland, intire of itselfe; every man
is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine;
if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe
is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as
well as if a Manor of thy friends or of thine
owne were; any mans death diminishes me,
because I am involved in Mankinde;
And therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.

In essence, every time a man dies, I am affected. Or, to turn it on its head: a group of men is something bigger than the constituent men are as individuals. Together, they are bonded, collective, and the loss of one is a loss of and to all. The text was originally prose, Meditation XVII: Devotions upon Emergent Occasions and IMNSHO this is far from Donne’s best verse. I was tickled by the occurrence of the word Emergent though. At Trampoline we often consider about the ways our technology can support and even identify emerging communities of interest. By this point, I was convinced Donne’s few lines had a good handle on what we’re trying to do at Trampoline, and why we’re doing it.

We believe that people aren’t alone at work. And if they are, they shouldn’t be. Groups and organisations succeed by being greater than the sum of their parts. The constituent parts need to work together to succeed. In Trampoline’s area of practice, large enterprises, that logic means that organisations should be encouraging people to work together, connect, collaborate and tap into each other’s knowledge. This often takes the form of giving people tools, perhaps software. In bringing people together to collaborate, you allow them to create something that wasn’t there before and couldn’t have existed without the fusing of their knowledge and ideas. This is particularly relevant to organisations full of knowledge workers whose main resource is in their employees’ heads, or organisations striving to succeed through innovation. Bunches of individuals working as hard as they can can’t produce new ideas and move them forward like groups of people working together can. We’re all in it together.

So there you have it: John Donne to Trampoline Systems, with stickers as my conceit. I’ll leave you to learn more about what Trampoline does and what Donne did. I recommend the ones about intelligent social networking for enterprises and persuading a lady into bed by ranting about fleas. The choice is yours.

Posted in Organisations & Technology | 1 Comment »

Twitter FTW

By mike | Monday, February 4th, 2008

So, the Facebook hype dust has settled and what we’re left with is a solid, social networking platform. I check my feed several times a day. But since Facebook added per-feed-item preferences I’ve started to notice exactly what it is I’m interested in hearing about my friends… and it’s Twitter.

Applications are a great way to broadcast your identity and they fulfil what I think is the most underrated of Maslow’s needs – esteem. The thing is, I already know all my friends on Facebook. I’ve met them all in the real world. Applications are an entertaining distraction but they aren’t sticky. Not for me, at least. What I come back for is the status updates – the contact with my friends – the ambient intimacy. I think applications were key to Facebook’s adoption – a soft, understandable way to get people interested – but it’s presence that’s of lasting interest. If anything, the applications have become a noisy albatross, distracting from the core signal.

Facebook’s genius was wrapping the new behaviour of broadcasting status in a consumable package. Presence, identity and ‘is’. It all fits perfectly. I’m glad that Facebook have finally removed the compulsory ‘is’ from their status input but I think that, initially, that little word provided a vital hint to the function of the box. Without it I’m not sure as many people would have grasped the concept. And that’s the problem Twitter has come up against: understanding.

From the very beginning I’ve had trouble explaining why I use Twitter. I love the sense of community and the constant stream of society that I get from it but I could never get that across to anyone. Why would I want to broadcast what I’m doing? Well, because my friends do. I like hearing from them so I’m reciprocating. These days I describe it as “Facebook status updates but without the applications crap”.

That description does Twitter a terrible disservice but it’s the simplest analogy I can find. What’s interesting though is that the functionality I derive from Twitter, despite its simplicity, actually covers off both Facebook status updates and wall posts (public but directed comments, via the @username convention) with one input field. It’s everything I’m interested in with none of the crap.

And its openness is a massive benefit where Facebook’s walled garden is going to become more and more of a hindrance. I log in to Facebook a few times a day to check my feed; I have Adium open receiving Twitter updates constantly. Twitter wins – it’s got more of my attention.

Twitter FTW!

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Enterprise Social Computing: What will happen in 2008?

By Charles Armstrong | Friday, January 4th, 2008

(This article is republished from the FASTForward blog where I’m a guest contributor)

This is my maiden posting for FASTForward so I’d like to thank the organisers for inviting me to write here. I’m CEO of Trampoline Systems, an enterprise social computing business in London (UK). My background is in the social sciences and in particular the discipline of ethnography; so my interest is primarily in human and organisational factors rather than pure algorithms. Life as CEO of a high-growth technology startup is exciting but somewhat relentless, so my postings here will probably not be frequent. However I’ll do my best to comment on interesting trends and possibilities I observe in the course of speaking to customers and colleagues in the hope this will be of interest to FASTForward readers.

For this first post I’m going to pick out a handful of the developments I think will be significant in 2008. Obviously this is a mug’s game since humans have such a rotten record of predicting the future. But here goes:

1. Many companies will commission pilots of “Facebook for the enterprise”. Most will fail to deliver any value. The meteoric adoption of Facebook by corporate users during the first half of 2007 did more than anything else to boost executive consciousness of social networking. For vendors like Trampoline this has been enormously helpful. Previously most of our conversations had to start with an explanation of the basic concepts. Now we can generally get straight to discussing the business value. However in 2008 we’re also going to see some negative outcomes from the Facebook phenomenon. Executives who have witnessed the rise of consumer social networking and sensed it may have significant implications for their business may make a knee-jerk response and instruct their IT team to instal a pilot implementation of “Facebook for the enterprise”. Established vendors and new entrants alike will rush to offer products that either plug into Facebook itself or provide a carbon copy of the platform with increased security to meet enterprise needs. However a lot of these pilots will fail to deliver value and will be abandoned. There will be two reasons for the failures. First, they will be based on the incorrect assumption that social networking techniques which work well in the consumer world will be equally successful in the enterprise. In fact it’s clear that the value of social networking in the enterprise is radically different than in the consumer world and substantially different techniques are consequently required. Second, the pilots will too often be set up without connection to a pressing business problem. This means there will be little urgency around the use of the new tools and little benefit to employees from adopting them. Many pilots of this kind will see enthusiastic adoption by 5% of the user community whilst the other 95% takes little or no notice.
2. Microsoft Sharepoint will gain rapid adoption as a surrogate for social computing. In 2008 a lot of businesses will be interested in social computing but nervous about implementing unfamiliar technologies. Microsoft Sharepoint is ideally placed as a “safe haven” for such businesses. Sharepoint opens up a degree of emergent structure and collaboration without rocking the boat. It slots into the familiar Microsoft product universe. In its 2008 guise it even presses some “social” buttons with wiki and blog functionality (though I wonder how many businesses will actually use these). Some businesses will find that Sharepoint takes them as far as they want to go. Many others will find its limitations frustrating and will go on to implement fully-fledged social computing solutions. Either way Sharepoint adoption is going to sky-rocket during 2008.
3. The first social computing applications to target specific business problems will appear. Up to now enterprise social computing has been limited to social networking platforms, blogs and wikis. These are all generic product categories with more-or-less universal application. 2008 will mark an important point of maturity in the sector with the launch of the first technologies that use social computing techniques to address specific business problems. These products will have little to do with social networking or content creation. Each one will be relevant only to a very specific vertical market or role. I don’t know what these applications will be and this is really my most speculative prediction; but I’ve got a strong hunch we’re going to see it happen during 2008.
4. “Enterprise Social Computing” will gain ground as an umbrella term alongside “Social Networking” and “Enterprise 2.0”. Words play a crucial role in the rise of any emerging technology. They provide handles that enable people to grasp and discuss unfamiliar ideas. They function as a useful shorthand for underlying phenomena that are often complex. Such terminology is inevitably in flux. As the technology develops and product categories begin to crystalise, new phrases emerge to describe the changing picture. There’s already been a slew of terms since 2000. “Social Software” was the first generic term used to describe blogs and wikis. “Web 2.0” was coined by Tim O’Reilly as a wider description of the socialisation of the consumer web. Andrew McAfee defined “Enterprise 2.0” to discuss how a parallel process would impact businesses systems. “Social Networking” is a long-standing academic term that took on a new meaning with the rise of Friendster, MySpace, LinkedIn and Facebook. Another academic term, “Social Graph”, came into general currency with the launch of OpenSocial. However none of these terms offers an umbrella description for the overall technology phenomenon and the need for such a term is growing rapidly. Over the last three months I’ve noticed a lot of people starting to use the phrases “Social Computing” and “Enterprise Social Computing”. These seem to be good umbrella terms and I find myself using them increasingly in preference to other terms. I suspect that Enterprise Social Computing will emerge during 2008 as a stable term for this new generation of business systems.

So those are my predictions for the next twelve months. All that remains is for me to wish FASTForward readers an exciting and rewarding year.

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Enterprise 3.0

By peter | Friday, December 7th, 2007

By 2015 large corporates will be moving en masse to a decentralized client computing environment based on laptops (or their kin) owned by users with time and usage leased back by their corporate masters. This will mark the era of the loosely-coupled enterprise (LCE).

This means virtualization, obviously. If your kid runs ‘torrent and you manage payroll, well, that could introduce some issues. You’ll need secure hardware to sit under your VM’s, and that means secure input, secure ouptput, TPM’s and isolated execution in every box. Der. This is needed to provide security against root-kits which do stuff like screen-scrape and keystroke log. You need to be “invulnerable” enough to rooting so that the coming wave of ever-more-sophisticated and targeted 0 day roots are manageable as per-VM annoyances rather than per-system nightmares.

All this HW-rooted-ness implies some form of federated vouchsafing-in-the-sky so that someone somewhere can make an intelligent decision about what to trust and when, to do something they care about. Reputation systems for SW, users and HW makes a lot of sense here. To prevent MITM attacks corporations will need a way to prove to users that they are who they say they are, so that means a much better, clearer identity for a corporation. Users will need a strong, accountable identity which they can “own” outside of the context of the strong, accountable identity their coporation owns.

When virtualization and decentralization come to pass then I can see one hell of a lot more Apple in wage-earner hands. I was talking to a certain Very Large Bank the other day and they claimed that one year ago they were very bullish on MSFT, but after looking at Vista for a year and doing a west-coast tour of all the obvious players, they are re-thinking their entire desktop strategy. They are saying they plan to chuck MSFT and go APPLE for the entire enterprise. That’s an OMG if I ever heard one.

If that’s true, it would be a mind-blowing sea-change and should cause EA/SA-focused sales folks at MSFT to completely wig out. The fact that this bank was even willing to mention it to me means they aren’t being laughed out of the room within their own company, and that is stunning. Apple in an enterprise? Woah. Virtualization is key here as it means you don’t have to forgoe Windows, you just put it in it’s own little box.

(If Apple had an ultra-mobile with a TPM 1.2 and a TCG-compliant BIOS to run BitLocker, I’d probably be using it right now. I admit it. But they don’t and I can get way more computer in a Lenovo that handles a drop test from way higher than any Apple…)

I see web-based everything with data getting cached all over the place. Local HD’s become simply the third (fourth?) fastest cache on my desk as part of a giant replicated cloud-o-networked data. Data becomes very boring, while knowledge and relationships (personal networks for you web geeks) become incredibly important.

Sooner or later Google will figure enterprises out and give MSFT proper competition, which could make Office usable again, among other things. (Wouldn’t that be nice?).

Google has pointedly started to work on phones, it would be really nice if they decided to focus on buiness phones, rather than on dashing themselves against the rocks of the cliffs of iPhone. Blackberry needs some real competition and it’s a great market to go after.

However I’m NOT predicting that, teh Googly kidz will make fonez for temselves, and tat means webby phonez with pics and kool stuphs.

Maybe they will make phones for the next 1B netizens, that would be really cool. Apple sure isn’t going to get the next 1B phone sales. MSFT may spend the next 3 years trying to de-cool Apple and failing, that would certainly be normal for both companies.

I think we will see a rebound effect AWAY from large cities for information workers as they realize that, now that the coporation is de-centralizing and they don’t have to be at the same office every day, they can have a pasture, chickens, dogs and dirt for their kids to get all over their faces, rather than an awful IKEA-esque nightmare of modern non-design. Neal Stephenson’s burbo-claves except fuelled by bio-diesel and with organic craft cheese.

Highly de-centralized businesses are less prone to things like terrorist attacks and pandemic plagues, too, which is a nice fringe benefit. Good luck to all you terrorists planning to attack Whitefish Montana. You go, I can’t wait to read about it.

All this implies a high-degree of webbiness, which means more interesting stuff much faster at some levels – but it may also mean REDUCED innovation in the underlying platform as applications become more and more portable, and thus more and more abstracted, and thus less and less interested in platform-specific capabilities.

What else? We will need a new (old) management theory, I’ll have a post on that later.

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Social Dynamics of Werewolves and Lynch Mobs

By alistair | Thursday, October 4th, 2007

For those of you who have never played Werewolf (aka Mafia) before, it’s a game based on blame-storming, finger-pointing, deviousness, manipulation, blatant lying, and do-unto-others-before-they-do-unto-you. Last night’s meetup of the werewolves of london (nothing to do with the rather catchy Warren Zevon song of the same name) was a chance for Peter and I to have a few beers at the massively-atmospheric-if-almost-impossible-to-find Shunt bar, hang out with a motley mix of actors, TV producers, game design researchers and random punters, and flex the old werewolf muscles that haven’t been used since I last did a drama workshop, many moons ago.

The thing about a good game of werewolf is, that you can turn up to a group of random people, most of whom who you’ve never met before, and within five minutes you’ll probably have a pretty strong suspicion about someone. Within ten minutes you’ll probably be defending yourself against a groundless (or is it…?) accusation or gleefully jumping on the bandwagon to lynch someone – anyone – else for no apparent reason, and within fifteen minutes you feel like you’re thinking yourself round an ever-thickening onion built on layers of “I know they said they’re a (whatever) but what if it’s a triple / quadruple / … / dodectuple bluff??”

I found it fascinating to see how the crowd mentality developed. In the very first round, there’s not really any reason for any one person to suspect anyone else, so accusations tend be either entirely arbitrary (in our first game we ended up spinning a bottle, just to get the game moving) or based on nothing more than gut feeling. After all, what makes you think someone is acting suspiciously? Is it the tone of their voice? Their body language? Or do you just flat-out not trust them? On what grounds?

Some interesting patterns I noted -

* those who stuck their neck out by accusing someone early on, tended to get the backlash if their accusation failed – if X accused Y, but Y was acquitted, someone nearly always accused X immediately afterwards, and X usually got lynched. Is this a British thing, to immediately suspect the accuser, presumably on the grounds of “methinks the lady doth protest too much” – or is it a common pattern across the pond as well?
* those who eventually turned out to be werewolves often tended to be the ones who had played it quietly, but not TOO quietly. In the latter stages of the game, as the paranoia starts to kick in, suspicion falls on anyone who has deviated from the norm in any way. Too quiet? Lynch them! Too loud? Too assertive? Lynch them!
* when accusations were being voted upon, it was quite rare for more than two people to stick their hands up immediately. Far more common was for the accuser and seconder to raise their hands, followed by a gap of a couple of seconds while everyone feverishly watches everyone else, waiting to see if the “Lynch them!” bandwagon was going to gain momentum or stop rolling altogether, before deciding whether or not to jump aboard.
* Once momentum was building up in a lynch vote, there’d be a late flood of “yes” votes, as people realised that someone was likely to be lynched, but if they voted “yes” to this person, it wouldn’t be them.
* people last night were also very reticent to claim to be the Healer or Seer. I only heard two people explicitly claim to be either, one of which was Peter. Remember, anyone can say pretty much whatever they like during the daytimes, it doesn’t mean it’s true – but what was also noticeable was that once it had been claimed, a couple of rounds later people seemed to have implicitly accepted their claim, by saying things like “but the Seer said that X was a werewolf, so…” Was this another British middle-class thing, to not want to flat-out lie or accept that your peer group is doing so? Or just a result of people’s short-term memory only going so far, and forgetting that anyone can claim anything they like?
* It’s also interesting, if a little scary, to mentally scale this up to, say, a few hundred people, and a real-world situation, and then disturb yourself by imagining the consequences of paranoia, suspicion, random accusation and mob justice.

Imagine renaming the game to “Salem Witch Hunt”. Or “McCarthyism”.

Or “Terrorist”.

So next time you’re in a “XYZ Project Post-Mortem” meeting, to blamestorm why a project failed or went over-budget, etc – think of Werewolf, and watch, and listen…. but don’t be *too* quiet, right?

We enjoyed it so much that we’re planning an office Werewolf-and-beer session, and I can heartily recommend it – I’d just advise that you don’t invite Derren Brown…

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Facebook will replace LinkedIn

By Charles Armstrong | Monday, August 6th, 2007

Last week Mike made the case that Facebook won’t replace LinkedIn, arguing that people prefer to manage their professional contacts separately from their friends. In my previous post I’d suggested that Facebook migh replace LinkedIn. In the light of Mike’s article I’m going to explain why I think this is likely to happen.

I created an account on LinkedIn three years ago and connected to a handful of friends, customers and collaborators. After that my account languished for a couple of years until the end of 2006 when I refreshed my profile and connected to some more people. Right now I’ve got 33 connections, qualifying me as a miserable norman-no-mates in LinkedIn land.

To put it bluntly I don’t like LinkedIn. I always feel a little bit dirty asking someone for a LinkedIn connection. I think this is probably because the platform offers such a coldly reductionist view of what a business relationship means. In LinkedIn all that counts is a person’s job title, where they’ve worked in the past and how many high-powered connections they’ve notched up. This dehumanises people and relationships, rendering them down to their mechanical and factual base. To use any system is to express complicity in the values it embodies. LinkedIn doesn’t reflect my values or my experience of professional relationships.

In May this year I created an account on Facebook (late adopter that I am) and got swept up in the usual ferment of friends and apps. The people I’ve listed as friends in Facebook cover a wide spectrum from purely personal to purely professional. But I’ve met all of them (with one exception) and I like all of them. Unlike LinkedIn, Facebook gives me a rounded picture of each person that might include their music and reading habits, glimpses of their family life, photos and video clips, updates from their Twitter feeds and so on. It’s important that the Facebook platform encourages people to interact in a playful way. I’m liable to find professional contacts slapping me with a kipper or turning me into a zombie. When was the last time that happened on LinkedIn?

In my experience successful businesses are built on strong relationships which include both professional and personal elements. I believe people have an innate preference to interact with each other across multiple dimensions, regardless of conventional work/life distinctions. LinkedIn makes absolutely no contribution to this whilst Facebook provides lots of helpful mechanisms. That’s why I predict people will increasingly use Facebook for their professional connections as well as their personal ones. Watch out LinkedIn!

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Facebook and the Enterprise

By Charles Armstrong | Thursday, August 2nd, 2007

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.

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