Here are some of the notes I compiled for the This Week in Lotus Podcast. Please note there was a lot of discussion on this and other topics on the podcast and the purpose of putting some of these notes out there is to cover content I wanted to share but didn't come up as a natural part of the discussion we had this morning. I know there are great counter arguments to some of my opinions and nuances that should be elaborated on, so have it folks.
Internally run collaboration is still much different from public social networks from a perspective of tools in the network. What is the Facebook answer to Files, Wikis, Blogs? It does not exist. It has status updates, events, pages and groups some severely lacking in tooling to manage anything. Social networks don’t necessarily need these tools baked in because that's not their purpose (socializing). In enterprise we need to get work done and that requires some specialized tooling to help us manage the information we are generating. We aren't at work to socialize, we are there to achieve goals and produce, the social aspect is just an aspect to layer on to do so with greater visibility and productivity.
To be honest I think social networks will develop these some of these tools because consumers can benefit from these tools as well. People with inter-mural sports leagues, boy or girl scout troops their children participate in, etc are using social networks to help coordinate their activities. They are seeing value in doing so but they are still sorely lacking in richness of features to manage the events and groups or present them in different formats enabling new insight. I’ll give Google Plus the benefit of the doubt and assume they will come up with great ways to integrate plus with Google Chat, Sites, GMail and Calendar to provide the rich tooling that is lacking in other networks. Granted with the Facebook app platform thrid parties can provide this is well, but I’m not convinced that is the best way to go for some things that should be core capability. The way Facebook has structured it it opens up a whole new avenue of security concern, now you’re sharing this data with a third party as well and they need to see some benefit from the transactions they are enabling.
Enterprise is not moving internal functions to any public free service platforms, any time soon. Ownership, control, security are all the primary concerns from the enterprise perspective. Can all these be addressed by a purely public platform to satisfy the enterprise? Do the social networks want to take on the liability and or display the flexibility they need to do to win business in the enterprise space. I think the market would have to change dramatically in stance towards risk or the assumed risk of the public platform for that to happen. Hosted and or SaaS commercial only options are a different story where providers can work more closely with customers to meet those needs. The last thing I want is my personal private network changing to win enterprise business. They are best off servicing their number one customer, individual consumers, and providing avenues for enterprises very specific ways of interacting with and understanding their users.
Take Wikipedia for example. It had an impact on validating the use case and value for wikis, however it also provides a wealth of data to the world as well, consumers and enterprise. In the long run that will be it's greater contribution to society in general. Enterprise will benefit from the functionality Google+ will drive through new integration and use paradigms as they make their way into enterprise software, but don't discount the value of other information Google may be able to compile from the new aspects it is adding to the vast hoard of user data it already has.
Workers don’t want Google+ adopeted for work either, they want the user experience because it enables social behavior without the challenges of driving collaboration through email. But who is really going to want finish reading the thread of a post among friends and move on to an alert that a system is down, or a customer is in a pinch and needs some extra attention ASAP.. It’s hard enough to disconnect from work now that so many are carrying corporate mobile devices.If your enterprise integrates with your social network of choice, how can you effectively disconnect? I’ve actually heard in more personal discussions with customers they are looking for the next big social network to decouple from some of the connections they’ve made with coworkers through public social platforms.
Enterprise customers do want to leverage the power of public social networks, I'd expect Goolge+ will be more open and friendly to integration points for back and forth collaboration between internal systems and public networks. I do understand there are a lot of tools on the consumer side living on desktops, browsers and mobile devices that help bridge multiple external social networks and can incorporate internal networks, but CRM and other in house systems can and should do better than having to rely on hacks utilizing consumer tools to move enterprise volumes of data between internal and external collaboration environments. Diaspora may have more impact in this regard than Google+
Just like Facebook design pushed in-house deployed products, Google + will push commercial vendors to add new features, and at a faster pace. The good news for those vendors is they don't have to do the research and development, just adapt what works for their product and it's use cases.
Link: This Week In Lotus Podcast
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