The organisational social software paradox

Last week I reported on the shape of the enterprise social networking space with the help of Andrew McAfee's Berkmann Centre lunchtime presentation on the subject. This week I'll get a little closer to home and present you with a paradox you're going to have to resolve if you're thinking of introducing social networking into your organisation.

A few months ago, Freeform Dynamics and MWD joined forces to carry out research among 201 companies on the subject of collaborative computing. The respondents were roughly equally split between France, Germany and the UK. All organisations were at least 1000 employees and half of them were over 5000. Sixty percent of the respondents were IT-centric and forty percent business-centric. All had some responsibility for workforce communication and collaboration.

The research contained all manner of interesting stuff but, as promised last week, I'm going to take a couple of charts out which relate to risk. One of our questions centred around the unofficial use of collaboration software within the organisation. As you can see from the chart below, social software of the kind we were discussing last week has crept into most of these organisations to some degree. Over fifty percent of respondents report wide adoption while almost every organisation has at least some.

In the officially sanctioned figures (not shown), social media is in third place at a little under 25% but instant messaging remains bottom of the heap.

Now, I don't know if I'm being dim here, but if something is unsanctioned, it seems that people would need to get it in by stealth. This is easy enough to do with solo desktop software (if organisational desktop control is lax enough) but social media, by its very nature, needs more than one participant and a shared location in which participants can 'meet', either synchronously or asynchronously.

This being the case, it seems highly likely that at least a percentage of those interviewed must be using public services in order to achieve their social networking objectives. Some, of course, will have an in-house 'skunk works' server - rather as Euan Semple did when he was at the BBC - but this requires some degree of computer skill and, of course the authorisation of the IT department at least.

So, let's take a look at the second chart. This relates to the concerns of the respondents towards the use of public services for this sort of thing. Don't forget it includes the conferencing, communication and screen sharing applications mentioned in the first chart.

Security, compliance, user distraction and support overhead all rank reasonably highly when you aggregate 'major concern' and 'some concern'.

We clearly have a discrepancy between what people are doing and what their organisations would like them to be doing. No doubt the employees have their reasons for behaving in this contradictory way. I'd hazard a guess that they've found the perceived benefits outweigh the perceived risks. Within most organisations, I'd have thought it unlikely that people would adopt social software just so they can chat to their personal friends. (By the way, if you'd like to alarm yourself with a detailed run down of risks, take a look at this new report on Web 2.0 security from the European Network and Information Security Agency.)

I'll confess to a degree of bafflement and, if you are in one of these contradictory situations, I'd love to hear from you. Perhaps you can tell me whether things are as laissez faire as they appear or whether guidelines and controls have been put in place to minimise, or at least balance, risk. And, maybe, tell us how hard it is for your organisation to take social networking seriously and what efforts you're making to articulate the commercial benefits to the powers that be.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Comments

[David Tebbutt]

Even in organisations which are the most active, in a social networking sense, not everyone sees it the same way, nor do all employees participate. And, even when they do, they still have the private/confidential part of their lives which, in general, increases according to the amount of regulatory scrutiny they're subject to.

I've realised that the stuff I'm working on isn't for a blog post, it's for an online magazine, so it will be a few weeks before it appears. I'm sorry for misleading you - I was having a rather hectic day when I replied earlier.

If you want to take a look at some statistics from IBM's use of social networking tools, you might be interested in this slideshow: http://www.slideshare.net/gpoole/ibm-web-2-0-goes-to-work-presentation-671274 - take a look at slide 16. Bear in mind the size of the organisation: IBM and its contractors together number over 500K people.

Now, I may return to the subject on Wednesday/Thursday but it is likely to be more anecdotal and drawn from conversations at Lotusphere than the other piece I'm working on.

[Not going to use my name for this post...]

I'm looking forward to reading it.

The company is interesting because many of the communications people are very receptive to working with and in social media. The problem emerges from people around the company particularly in finance who are truly fearful of social media. This is then complicated by the IT organization which just doesn't get it. They think (or at least they say) that they are helping the business make strides into the social media realm. They take credit for the victories of others, and stifle a lot of innovation.

In short - it's a political mess.

[David Tebbutt]

"IT maintains very tight control over desktop based applications - it is almost impossible to get anything useful installed. However, we have no real limits on internet usage." Priceless! Thank you so much for writing. I don't blame you for your anonymity.

I'm working on a post on the business value of social networking. You might want to wave it at the powers-that-be and see what, if anything, happens. Look out for it on Wednesday/Thursday (depends on time zone and my ability to deliver on time.)

[Not going to use my name for this post...]

I work in an organization just like this.

I work for a multinational company in the US. IT maintains very tight control over desktop based applications - it is almost impossible to get anything useful installed. However, we have no real limits on internet usage. As a consequence when a communicative problem presents itself and a solution exists in the cloud, I and many of my coworkers will use it.

I work with people outside of the company on many projects. These people like to communicate via IM, and I can't even get a good IM client that will allow me to communicate beyond the firewall. Gchat is the easy answer. That's just one example.

Our IT organization does very poor work. We have inferior technology and infrastructure which does mean that we are putting more at risk by going outside... but we are trying to operate in a hi-tech world with 10 year-old technology and no real support.