Respected colleague, Tony Byrne (editor of CMS Watch, which often does deep industry reports) took an interesting look at Facebook in his piece, Is Facebook in the Enterprise an Oxymoron?

Since Tony is one my top respected resource for all-things-content, I know he is not one to take this subject lightly. I consider his attention to this topic as a call to take serious note.  He shares:
“At CMS Watch we’ve been experimenting with Facebook as a collaboration platform internally and with external partners, and we like it. There are some definite limitations to Facebook as a portal. The inconsistent behavior and security profiles of different Facebook applications will be familiar to any portal developer struggling with third-party portlets or Web Parts. Facebook applications seem to revolve principally around people rather than groups, which can be inconvenient for professional collaboration (where typically micro-applications are applied selectively to workspaces). Facebook doesn’t have real document management — although arguably you wouldn’t want it seated there anyway — and Alfresco and others have developed hooks into Facebook from their repositories.”

Then he cautions:
“But when does Facebook-behind-the-firewall stop being Facebook? I think the minute a central authority gets behind it — and instinctively mandates some available MOBIG (Microsoft/Oracle/BEA/IBM/Google) software because it happened to be familiar or free — is the minute the system will lose its appeal to rank-and-file employees.”

In comparing the use of Facebook to the simplicity of SharePoint, Tony notes:
“…the problem with SharePoint is that there is no native way to manage multiple instances of it. “

I ‘m particularly supportive of his recommendations to IT: 
“I suggest offering (or just allowing) a set of collaboration alternatives. Then step back, keep lifecycle management as unobtrusive as possible, and see what takes off. This may mean allowing multiple collaboration solutions — including hosted solutions — to compete internally. May the best one win. I’m not suggesting this will be easy; in fact, it may take hard work to retrofit suitable retention and security services onto a newfangled collaboration package that was not explicitly designed for enterprise-wide deployment — but became popular across your enterprise nonetheless. “

Here’s my only caveat to the latter…I fundamentally believe in the principle of evolution, but when not having a ’standard’ creates islands of identities then there’s a problem. If you can ‘architect’ a cross-offering so that people can search for an individual based on attributes and be able to find them, then I’m ok. Maybe someone at FAST can weigh in on meaningful architectural/governance approaches here?

In the end, the result should accomplish what I normally champion, but Tony did a great job:
Start by institutionalizing an attitude that says, “how can we help our employees be more effective?” Specifically, “how can we support them in the way they really want to work (as opposed to the way we think they want to work)?”

Tony shared with me directly: “And btw, I quite agree with your caveat about silos.  We are seeing the lack of standards come home to roost here (though it’s not anybody’s fault).  It’s really more of an intuitive feel that product selection for collaboration/networking tools has to be bottom-up, rather than top-down, and the price we’ll pay in the short run is a proliferation of repositories until a standard is set….“

Somehow colleagues in Europe were on the same wavelength as today they forwarded this “Social networking ‘white elephant’ warning“. This piece reminded me of my insistence on a ’synthesized’ profile for individuals, which should provide for internal ‘confidential’ content/references and yet leverage the public profiles/identities individuals may already have and maintain (i.e. don’t recreate reality), including blogs. Besides, in this faster-paced, rapidly changing work environment, resources can and should have public identities separate from the company/entity they happen work for at this moment in time.

I’m reminded of the time where I was so struck by the backwardness of accepted thinking around work relationships, when I had to go to considerable lengths to explain to my daughters why I was up at 5:30 on my computer the week after I’d been laid off from a job (never mind I should have been working to land my next relationship). I said: “I do what I do regardless of who I work for. I just sometimes happen to do what I do for a specific company.”

The one observation from the warning that I totally disagree with: “There is also little evidence that social networking will be as beneficial for businesses as other web-based communications tech such as instant messaging and VoIP.” Good grief. The PRIMARY justification for social networking from an enterprise perspective is to connect resources TO each other,  by way of the context their profiles provide. You can’t leverage instant messaging and VoIP, until you’re aware of the other resource’s existence. It’s a matter of ACCESS (findability). So yes, “Ultimately, Gartner suggests, the value of social networking tech comes from content rather than the product itself.“