Information, and Social Networking, Is Power in the Enterprise

Art Cole spoke with David Dines, analyst with Wainhouse Research.

Cole: Social networking is one of the hottest topics in consumer circles, but enterprises are still feeling their way around. What are some of the ways social networking can be used to boost productivity?
Dines: If you look at social networking from the big picture, consumers are using it, there’s a big buzz around it and everyone’s excited. A lot of people in the enterprise are asking, “What does Facebook have to do with my company?” If you break down what social networking includes, there are wikis, blogs, personal information – use of Web technology for people to socialize and collaborate. We’ve actually had this capability since the days of Arpanet and usenet. It’s a very efficient way for people to communicate in lots of different areas. The same way that college kids can plan a party in about 10 minutes, with everyone getting the same information to meet at a certain place, in the corporate world, it’s about organizing a meeting. Instead of everyone sending e-mail after e-mail to determine who’s available when, it just happens.

There are two general ways in which social networking can be used for business. For internal use, it’s good for collaborative-type processes and for better search, discovery and information storage. It helps improve human resource issues because people are able to get on board and communicate with each other more effectively.

But it can also be used to communicate with customers, either for branding and advertising or support. The business case for external use is pretty strong. You set up a wiki and you reduce the amount of calls coming into your call center and reduce the amount of time people on the inside spend answering questions. You put findings in a blog or on a wiki and suddenly the information that was in one person’s head is readily available to everyone.

Cole: Is it a simple matter of booting up the appropriate software and letting users do their thing? Or are there other elements to consider? Improvements to servers, storage, network infrastructure?
Dines: That depends. One of the things I have found is that the technology part is 20 percent and the people part is 80 percent. Social networking does not produce a large network load – no more than normal Web surfing – although there will definitely be a storage increase. But each vendor is different and will recommend a different implementation that will have varying needs as far as servers and storage.

The other option is the hosted model. If you are looking to provide external networking for customer support, then your best bet is to keep it as a hosted model.

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