The real power of network computing may turn out to be as a place for various users to interact in various ways. Observe how social networks have increased in value over the last few years. In 2005, the News Corporation purchased MySpace for $580 million. In October 2006, Google purchased YouTube for $1.65 billion. In September of this year, Microsoft's bid to acquire a five percent stake in Facebook puts a projected $10 billion value on the social networking site. When real money talks, it is time to take social networking seriously.

Is there some value for it in the business space? The fact is we already are using network-based social networking tools in the workplace. Things such as instant messaging, chat, e-mail, file sharing, blogs, discussion groups, and collaboration tools are all part of the fabric of social networking and are currently used in business settings. The piece that is missing is the one that connects users together through information and data stored in their profile. Matching profile information provides the ability within an organization to determine such things as:

o Who has expertise in a particular subject?

o Who knows someone else to whom you need to connect?

o Who knows whom to contact at another organization?

o Who knows a good Sushi restaurant in Hartford?

In short, a good social networking system functions as a sort of virtual neural network connecting disparate bits of information. Ready access to those bits of information makes the whole thing work. I may have discovered a way to create all my TPA reports in half the time it used to take. Keeping that knowledge to myself may make me appear and perform better, but it provides little benefit to the organization unless that knowledge is shared. A corporately sanctioned and controlled social network is one way to share that knowledge.

Old School Hurdles

I fully understand this concept can strike fear into the heart of corporate types. Blog, wikis, discussion groups, and personal Web sites smack of individualism and are perceived as anti-corporate. When discussing blogs in the corporate environment, human resource managers are likely to raise the first objections. "We can't allow individuals to post their opinions and thoughts on the company intranet. We won't have any control over what they may say." Hmmm . . . I thought 1984 was like 23 years ago.

I don't intend to make light of real issues regarding free speech in the workplace, but I would like to address the most common objections. We already have one issue (lack of control). The second is the belief employees will waste too much time blogging and chatting and networking.

The Waste Land

The fact is employees already waste a lot of time. A study sponsored by AOL and Salary.com found employees admit to wasting an average of two hours a day. A Microsoft study seemed to indicate most workers provide only about three days of productive work in a five-day workweek. The biggest distraction was personal Internet use for most respondents to these surveys. The next biggest distraction was socializing with workers. Younger workers waste more time than older workers. And get this: According to the AOL and Salary.com survey, "The three sectors of the economy in which workers wasted the most time were–in order–insurance, government, and education."

I do not intend to debate the validity of surveys or polls, but I think we all know people don't spend their entire workday in productive work. And I suspect there is some upper limit to productivity we can strive for. But unless your workers are shackled to a machine in an assembly line, you have less control over productivity than you would like.

Sharing Is Good

Company-sponsored social networking tools may well replace the time spent in nonproductive behavior with time spent in ways that are productive to the organization, even if they are not directly job related. The company I work for promotes individual blogs. When I come across a particularly difficult or new problem and spend some productive and billable time solving that problem, I am encouraged to post that information in my blog. That way when another employee encounters a similar or identical situation, a quick search across all those blogs returns a possible solution. You could even make a case for calling this part of an SOA environment. My knowledge is available across the enterprise and is packaged (in my blog) for reuse.

What's Mine Is Mine–Not

This brings up another issue. Social networking is not just about network tools. It is about culture. If the corporate culture is not to share or collaborate, then we have another hurdle. If the actual or perceived value of employees is their specific knowledge, then employees may be reticent to share their knowledge. According to this view, my only sense of job security may be I am the only person in the entire enterprise who understands XYZ. If I share that information, then I am replaceable.

That kind of thinking is based on pre-industrial revolution thinking. The village shoemaker always will have work because everyone needs shoes. The only threat to his livelihood is another shoemaker. We will find pockets of this type of thinking in any organization, but the best companies know encouraging sharing and creative thinking provides much greater benefit than ivory tower silos of knowledge.

Manage–Not Restrict

Let's get back to one of our original objections to social networking in the organization: lack of control. First of all, any overtly inappropriate behavior is not to be tolerated whether that behavior is manifested as a blog entry or an offensive T-shirt. Employees will need to be managed and mentored, but electronically shackling an employee isn't managing. Most corporate IT departments are seen as restrictive–as in computer use policies that are just a list of things you can't do. Restricting employees does not promote creativity; it creates people who learn how to survive within the restrictions. Permissive policies geared toward sharing information and ideas tend to promote creativity. And creativity leads to better productivity for the organization as a whole.

I am not claiming social networking is going to transform the organization overnight. Nor is it a panacea for all corporate issues. It is, however, a very real and viable phenomenon in our culture and, as such, should be embraced or at least tolerated within the corporate culture. New generations of knowledge workers already are using these types of tools. It only makes sense to extend that paradigm to the work space. Would you rather have employees complaining about the current healthcare plan on their personal blogs or on ihatemycompany.org?

Nothing New Under the Sun–Redux

I suspect most readers of this magazine are using social networking tools. More than 14 million professionals from various industries network through www.linkedin.com. LinkedIn's slogan is: "Relationships Matter." And indeed they do. What do our sales staffs talk about? Building relationships. Social networking is all about building relationships.

A few years back, my team created a little network application whose purpose was to provide a central place where employees would place information about our corporate customers. We had many individuals who would interact with clients, and we wanted to capture all that knowledge so that when the next person was to call on that client, the collective information of the enterprise was available. Unfortunately, very few people bothered to share their knowledge, and that application was permanently recycled. That application was built on the old way of thinking–forcing employees to go to a central location to share their knowledge. A well-oiled social network solution could provide a lot of that information by matching up indexed knowledge, metadata, and user profiles.

Sales and business development staff have relied on networking tools forever. In the past, those tools might have been a social or fraternal organization or a golf course or a shoebox full of index cards. Today, that tool set includes the Internet and sites such as LinkedIn. Wouldn't it be nice if this also included a corporate social network, one that could inform a sales person regarding who in the organization already has a relationship with a potential client–a relationship that can be exploited for additional benefit?

Earlier this year, Microsoft released a "technical preview" for Microsoft Office Server 2007 called the Knowledge Network. (The technical preview was officially closed in June 2007.) Knowledge Network is an add-on to MOSS 2007 designed to "automate the discovery of business relationships and subject matter expertise in the network to provide vital business insights enabling users to make better decisions more quickly." It provided a way to create personalized automated member profiles that were searchable and discoverable throughout the organization. Is it surprising Microsoft is interested in getting a piece of Facebook? I don't know whether Knowledge Network will be part of the next release of SharePoint, but I would not be surprised if it were. I also would not be surprised to see other social networking tools geared to the corporate world.

Services such as Facebook and MySpace are not going to go away. Knowledge workers can be expected to use social networking services to enhance their personal lives. I see no compelling reason for why business should not build on that cultural propensity to enhance the business environment. It really is all about sharing war stories and experience around the water cooler or over a martini. All we are doing is replacing the mechanism. Anyway, water coolers are pass?, and martinis are bad for you.