The Workplace Blog

Everywhere I turn people seem to be talking about Facebook. Whether it is the exponential growth, the shrewdness of Mark Zuckerberg or the new widget strategy, Facebook seems to be everywhere. In fact, the latest issue of The Economist magazine devotes a full page to the Facebook phenomena and to Zuckerberg.

But should you really care? Yes, and here’s something important that you need to know about Facebook.
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Danah Boyd is probably my favorite social networks researcher. She’s produced some formidable research and is one of the leading thinkers on social networks and the online youth culture. Here’s an interesting quote of hers in which she explains why social networking has captured the imagination of so many teenagers.

“Publics offer youth a space to engage in cultural identity development. By engaging in public life, youth learn to interpret the cultural signals that surround them and incorporate these cultural elements into their life. For a diverse array of reasons, contemporary youth have limited access to the types of publics with which most adults grew up. As a substitute for these inaccessible publics, networked publics like MySpace and Facebook are emerging to provide contemporary American youth with a necessary site for peer engagement.”

The critical question is what about us in the workplace? Do we have a shortage of “publics” in which to interact with one another? Traditionally conferences served as our publics. But our industries have gotten so fragmented that we need to attend several in a year to keep pace with our fields. Unfortunately, carving out the time or the dollars for this is often difficult. Also, with Internet time affecting every industry, attending conferences a few times a year don’t provide the immediacy and intensity of engagement that we now need. Maybe that’s why more companies are gravitating to online communities like LinkedIn and Facebook. We too are having to create new online publics!

Google continues its march into the enterprise with its acquisition of Postini today. Postini is an email service that monitors communication for brokerage firms to insure regulatory compliance. It is a 100% hosted service. As the New York Times and others have reported, this acquisition allows Google to offer services to businesses via its enormous network of data centers. Yes, we’re talking about software as a service again.

What does this mean? A couple of things. Google is getting extremely serious about the enterprise space. Google’s strategy is to buy or build tools that enable it to take its consumer offerings into the enterprise in a credible and secure manner. Rather than build software products, most of its enterprise attack is going to be driven by software as a service solutions. And its offerings are going to be dirt cheap (or maybe even free) as it hopes to leverage economies of scale, its past investments in data centers and of course depend on advertising. In other words, Google wants to become the Salesforce of everything other than CRM in the enterprise. It sounds like a good strategy. Lets see whether the CIOs will buy it.

While reading the Wall Street Journal last Friday, I came across an article that highlighted one company that was giving its employees money to purchase phones. Rather than impose a corporate standard and mandate every employee to conform to its cell phone choice, the company gave its employees the freedom to choose which phones to purchase. The employees bought their own phones, filed their expense reports and took more responsibility for the upkeep and maintenance of the technology.

I was fascinated. Why can’t much more of IT function this way? Sure there are compatibility, privacy, security and support issues to take care of in such as scenario. But these can be addressed or certainly contained. For example, I work for an organization that is filled with smart technologists. They don’t need an IT department to tell them what is the best cell phone or computer to use. They’d much larger purchase their own phones and choose how to link to the corporate network.

Our economy is increasingly being driven by trust, it is time we trusted our employees more. And there’s no better way to do that than by putting more of an IT budget in their own hands. Click to Gartner’s High Performance Workplace to read more about this emerging technology subculture which they call “employee-enabling” versus “MIS-centric”.

Assignment Zero was a spectacular project that aimed to use crowdsourcing philosophies to interview experts about crowdsourcing. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a complete success. However, many of the interviews are gems and are worth reading. I particularly enjoyed the Howard Rheingold and the Eric von Hippel interviews.

Information Week highlighted Motorola’s Enterprise 2.0 efforts a few weeks ago. To quote, it has 70,000 people using their “Intranet 2.0″ everyday. The company now has 4,400 blogs and 4,200 wiki pages. To quote from the article,

Still, Enterprise 2.0 technologies don’t exactly make for easy ROI calculations, which Redshaw readily admits. Instead, he chats up how exactly work has changed since Motorola has implemented Intranet 2.0. Inside the IT organization, product development times have shortened considerably. Instead of developing a different pitch for every client, salespeople can now reuse information that might be posted on a wiki. And in Motorola’s Dallas distribution center, employees clicking on mobile alerts that come to their smart phones are sent directly to a wiki to troubleshoot problems, rather than being left scratching their heads over some problem.

Redshaw is Motorola’s VP of Enterprise 2.0 technologies. If I was interviewing him, I would have liked to ask questions like these too - What exactly does product development times being shortened mean? Is this specific just to the IT department? At what levels in the company and in which functions are the enterprise 2.0 technologies being used. How often are they used and updated? Enterprise 2.0 is young and the sooner we have more specific information, the sooner will the space mature.