Yammering away at the office

Illustration by Ian Whadcock

AN ASTONISHING amount of time is being wasted on investigating the amount of time being wasted on social networks. Studies regularly claim that the use of Twitter, Facebook and other such services poses a threat to corporate wealth. One published last year by Morse, an IT company, estimated that personal use of social networks during the working day was costing the British economy almost £1.4 billion ($2.3 billion) a year in lost productivity. Another, by Nucleus Research, an American firm, concluded that if companies banned employees from using Facebook while at work, their productivity would improve by 1.5%.

This assumes that people would actually work rather than find some other way to pass the time they have to spare. In the same vein, perhaps companies should also ban water coolers and prohibit people sending e-mails to their friends. The assumption that firms can block access to the networks altogether is also rather heroic. Some employees now have web-enabled smart phones, so trying to stop them from surfing their favourite sites will be another waste of time.

To veterans of the technology industry, the fuss over social networking sounds all too familiar. Whenever a new and disruptive technology appears, there is initially a backlash against it before it becomes broadly accepted. Even a seemingly innocent application such as Microsoft's Excel spreadsheet was greeted with much scepticism because managers assumed workers would use it to make lists of their fantasy football teams or their weekend shopping—which is exactly what they did and still do. But along the way, Excel has also become an invaluable business tool.

Social networks were not designed for businesses as Excel was. Instead they are part of a growing trend known as the “consumerisation” of IT. Thanks to companies such as Apple, Google and Facebook, people now have access to communications devices and web applications that are often far superior to those offered by their employers. And thanks to cloud computing, which allows all sorts of computing services to be delivered via the internet, they can use these devices and applications pretty much wherever they like, including in offices and factories. This trend is accelerating as more digitally savvy youngsters enter the workforce with their iPhones at the ready.

Moreover, as people become increasingly used to sharing and collaborating outside the workplace, they are coming to expect firms to be more open and collaborative places too. Many companies are organised into strictly separate regional, product-line and functional “silos”, making it hard for people to share information beyond their immediate colleagues. And the rise of vast, globe-spanning corporate empires with hundreds of thousands of employees has left many folk isolated in small work groups run by managers who care only about their particular fiefs. As a result, efforts are duplicated and valuable information ends up being hoarded, not shared.

I spy A-Space

In the corporate world such hoarding leads to lost profits. In the world of intelligence it can lead to lost lives. The recent unsuccessful attempt by a terrorist to blow up an American aircraft in flight has highlighted the need for better information-sharing among security agencies. To improve matters, the intelligence community is developing a system called A-Space, a sort of Facebook for spies that holds profiles of analysts from various agencies and allows them to contact one another and to share large amounts of text, graphics, images and videos.

Before a pilot of the system was launched in 2008 it often took weeks, sometimes months, for spooks to track down relevant people to talk to at other agencies. “The intelligence community was a bunch of stove pipes,” says Ahmad Ishaq, A-Space's project manager. Now the 14,000 people with access to the secure system can easily and quickly get in touch with each other.

Social networks are being used to break down internal barriers in the corporate world too. A few companies, such as Zappos, an online retailer owned by Amazon, encourage employees to use public networks such as Twitter to share information. The argument for using a system that allows the world to see what a firm's employees are up to is that it helps make faceless corporations seem more human in the eyes of their customers. Networks such as Twitter are also free and very easy to use, which means people adopt them quickly.

But most companies are deeply uncomfortable with the notion of baring all to such a wide public. Among other things, they fret that employees might let slip confidential data, that competitors will be alerted to forthcoming innovations and that the public networks will be hard to integrate with their internal IT systems. Firms in highly regulated industries such as pharmaceuticals and banking are especially wary of allowing information from their staff to circulate freely.

This has generated interest in Enterprise 2.0 networks tailor-made for the corporate world. These work in much the same way as a Twitter or a Facebook, but keep information off the public web and behind a corporate firewall. They have several other advantages too. Many automatically pull information from companies' human-resources systems into people's profiles. Services such as IBM's Lotus Connections and Salesforce.com's Chatter can also be easily integrated with other IT tools that workers use, so they are more likely to be adopted than public networks.

These corporate “Facebooks” can also be tweaked to fit firms' specific needs. Nicolas Rolland, who is helping to bring in an online social network for the almost 90,000 employees of Danone, a global food group based in France, says that the company added invitation-only private discussion groups after getting requests from staff who wanted to share confidential information. Danone, whose workers are spread across more than 100 countries, is testing its network in several locations before making it more widely available.

Goodbye to silos

Although these are early days, companies say such network initiatives are already speeding up knowledge-sharing and internal communications. Samuel Driessen, who is overseeing the introduction of Yammer at Océ, a large printer company based in the Netherlands, says the messaging system has helped the firm spot where work is in danger of being duplicated and share information about sales prospects. Danone's Mr Rolland reckons its system has already led to smart operating practices being shared more efficiently.

Marc Benioff, the chief executive of Salesforce.com, predicts that demand for corporate social-networking services will take off as managers realise that they now know more about strangers on Twitter and Facebook than they do about the people in their own organisation. Some analysts agree with him (see chart 6). Mr Benioff even thinks social computing could be the next big business for the IT industry after cloud computing. Perhaps so, but social networks must clear several hurdles before they can enter the corporate mainstream.

The first of these is the lingering doubt about networks' ability to deliver genuine benefits. “The biggest challenge most companies are facing is that the value propositions for social networks are all soft,” explains Greg Lowe, who champions the use of Yammer and other social media at Alcatel-Lucent, a Franco-American telecoms firm. Yet there are grounds for thinking the benefits they create are worth having. A study last year by IDC, a research firm, found that knowledge workers spend between six and ten hours a week hunting for information. By using social networks to find data faster, employees can free up a chunk of that time for other things, says Caroline Dangson, an analyst at the firm.

Yet even if they can make a good business case for a network, some managers hesitate to introduce one because they fear that staff might use it to broadcast politically incorrect comments. Andrew McAfee, a professor at MIT who has seen many corporate networks in action, thinks that this concern is overblown. “I find it hard to believe that employees were waiting for social networks to come around to be able to post something inappropriate,” he scoffs. He points out that because all comments can be traced to their authors, people are very careful about what they post.

A flowering of ideas

A third hurdle is that bosses are worried about allowing informal groups of workers to spring up that managers cannot control. Yet this is precisely why the systems are so valuable. Often new ideas and insights—as well as warnings about potential threats—come from informal contacts rather than from formal meetings. The trouble is that existing IT systems are geared towards reinforcing separate silos rather than building bridges between them.

Services such as Yammer and Chatter create a more open workplace by letting people see what others are working on and encouraging sharing. The upshot is that good ideas can emerge from anywhere. This should be a reason for celebration rather than a cause for suspicion. “If you trust your employees, then you have nothing to worry about when deploying a social network,” says Eugene Lee, the chief executive of Socialtext, which provides social-media services to firms.

The networks are also a great way to capture knowledge and identify experts on different subjects within an organisation. Mr Driessen at Océ says that many earlier knowledge-management systems were little more than boring collections of documents. Social networks are a huge improvement over them because they combine content with commentary from people whose know-how might previously not have been recognised. Suzanne Livingston, the head of IBM's social-software operations, says that firms can even create new, jointly owned social networks or splice existing ones together to share know-how with outsiders.

Some executives see another big benefit of networking. A few of the systems on offer have analytical tools built into them that let managers track information such as which people are regularly in contact with one another and what subjects they are discussing. This “social business intelligence” can then be used to, for example, identify people for a project team based on their expertise and their links to others whose support will be needed to make the project a success. But the data could also be used to make judgments about candidates for a promotion or to spy on colleagues. All this makes some people queasy. What happens with personal data is a big issue not just within companies but for the big public networks too.