At the cmf2007 conference last week, there were some great sessions and conversations about intranets including James Robertson’s presentation of the 2007 Intranet Innovation Awards . There were also many interesting discussions about Facebook inspired by BJ Fogg’s insightful keynote on persuasive technology (this guy knows his Facebook – he teaches a college course on it at Stanford). The two topics merged with the provocative assertion: “Facebook will be your next intranet.” The idea has been clattering around in my head all week and then I read this news that Serena is starting to use Facebook as their Intranet on Toby Ward’s Intranet Blog. I am sure that Toby’s article was what got the whole conversation going but I didn’t know it at the time. Apparently, the CEO of Serena is a huge Facebook user and has designated Friday as a day when employees should spend an hour exploring and interacting on Facebook.
What fascinates me about this idea is that most Intranets fail as social collaboration tools because they cannot capture the energy and passion that seems to form spontaneously on the web. At least that is my theory. And my theory goes on to assert that people do not invest their personal energy on their corporate intranet because they don’t own it. While people do not own Facebook, there is a tacit agreement that a user’s Facebook profile belongs to the user. The user can always access it and edit it and he is free to do with it what he wants. A corporate intranet cannot provide this assurance. When the employee leaves the company all the creativity, personality and knowledge invested in the corporate intranet are lost to him. A user has a right to feel like he owns his personality, friendships and ideas.
Because people are not owned by their employers, they interact in a community that transcends corporate boundaries. This is why internal instant message system are never as popular as AIM, YIM, and MSN Messenger. This is also why email crushed those internal messaging systems that companies used to use. You need to communicate (professionally and socially) with people outside of the firewall as much as you do inside the firewall. If your network is entirely contained by your company. Stop reading this blog post immediately and go out and meet some people.
Internal communities of practice fail because the population is not large enough to support them. If you ever took an ecology course, this is similar to Island Biogeography. Just as species cannot survive in small, isolated pockets, neither than communities of interest. You need a population that is big enough to allow healthy turnover and new ideas. If you are interested in a topic, you would do better to join a large open community than to try to start one with the three people in your company that share your interest. It used to be that the physical proximity provided by and office made intra-office communities more viable. Now, with the Internet, location is less of an issue. Being co-workers is an arbitrary requirement to community building that often stands in the way.
So, back to Facebook. The biggest argument against Facebook as the corporate intranet is information security. Much of the information that employees work with needs to stay within the company. Furthermore, there is a fear that allowing employees to be visible makes them vulnerable to being stolen by other companies. If your company is such a bad place to work that the only thing retaining employees is that no one knows about them to hire them away, you have bigger problems than your Intranet. Ideally, employees from other companies would see your employees on Facebook and all the fun they are having and want to come and work for you. Even if they do not come to work for you, they might be inspired to provide feedback or information that will be of some value.
Facebook would be a poor place for people to collaborate on company projects and other strategic stuff. However, how much of this information actually needs to be private? Does a company holiday calendar need to be private? Probably not. An interesting exercise would be to go though your Intranet and identify all the content that could be out in the open or at least minimally protected. While you are at it, you should identify information on your intranet that nobody needs to see. Now I am getting into Bob Boiko’s talk “Leading with Information”. That deserves another post.
Facebook’s “Network” feature supports workplace networks. This allows a user to take their profile (that he owns) and use it within a closed community. The same profile can, at the same time, be used in external communities. When the employee leaves the company, he just leaves the network. All the other aspects of his profile stay with him.
I guess it all depends on what you hope to achieve in your intranet. If you want to provide tools to facilitate specific workplace functions and information, then a closed intranet makes the most sense. If you are trying to create communities and build social and professional connections, you can’t beat the Internet.
Related posts:
- Intranet 2.0 Survey Toby Ward and the Prescient Digital team is conducting an...
- Alfresco and Facebook Many open source software projects have started to experiment with...
- Should you host your intranet and corporate website on one platform? Often times by the time a client gets to finding...
- Does “Intranet” Need a New Name? James Robertson has an excellent post, Future principle: it’s more...
- Social Bookmarking on Your Intranet I have been thinking a lot recently about intranets as...
Hi Seth
I agree that this is certainly an interesting topic, and I certainly enjoyed debating ‘FaceBook is your next intranet’ at the town hall session.
I attempted to address some of the security questions in this posting after attending the Office 2.0 conference: http://ecm-stuff.blogspot.com/2007/11/interesting-times.html
I think its all about the context of the organisation. Any Web 2.0, Office 2.0 or SaaS type offering that hosts your data somewhere on the net will work for some organisations, but not for others. As a University we are putting a lot of effort into investigating Facebook at the moment, because as BJ Fogg noted, our students are going to be on there anyway ! However I would not expect MI5 to be using it as part of their Intranet
nice post. Now that Alfresco announced integration with Facebook, i think the adoption of such tools within the enterprise will only increase
I understand what the dynamic of Facebook can bring to any intranet. But I still have a problem with the idea of managing an intranet using… the internet. It seems to me social networking is only a part of an intranet, and some ‘traditional’ features have to be managed internally. Perhaps one solution would be to go for intranet 2.0, with a balanced mix of closed content and opened networking?
Thanks for your comments! Great points. For me, the big idea is that the strategy of attracting people the intranet by making it as fun and cool as the Internet is flawed. People are going to make their personal connections on sites like Facebook. But they still need a good Intranet for business tasks. But I do wonder if any companies are building some Facebook apps to do some administrative tasks. How about writing a performance review on an employees “FunWall?” OK. That is going too far.
No problem with your main theme, but a quibble with a detail: If my employer published my holiday plans in public, I’d regard it as a breach of privacy. Your colleagues need to know you won’t be in the office; fair enough. On the other hand, you don’t want to announce to potential burglars that your house will be empty for a fortnight!
Hi Dominic, I think we just had a localization problem. When I mentioned a Holiday Calendar, I meant the U.S. meaning (when the company is closed: “bank holidays”) – not days that an employee has requested leave (“vacation” in the U.S.). I agree that you would not want people to have to post when they are out of town. On a similar topic, I think “out of the office” automatic replies sometimes give too much information. I subscribe to a lot of mailing lists and sometimes the list gets spammed by these auto-reply messages.
Well, I would never ever consider not even a second using facebook for a company intranet. I barely accept to use facebook because you don’t have another way.
I would rather prefer having my own system to do that. I agree that owning your profile is the incentive, but it’s not enough. Facebook owns also the infrastructure, and it’s preventing me to post too much. For example, I don’t put too many pictures on it. Same thing for flicker, posterous, etc, etc.