First, a piece of apocrypha:
A very long time ago. Two shoe salesmen make the long journey by boat from England to Africa. Coach. Very tired. And on the first night there, despite their tiredness, they both send urgent telegrams home. One says “Nobody wears shoes here. Catching next boat home.”. And the other says “Nobody wears shoes here. Please send reinforcements”.
Nobody wears shoes here. It’s all about perspective.
That’s the way I feel about Facebook in the enterprise. Every enterprise has a choice, to “catch the next boat home” or to “send reinforcements”. Depends on how you look at it. So here are some perspectives to help you. Mine, admittedly, but then you would expect that here, wouldn’t you?
Feel Like I’ve been here before And you know It makes me wonder What’s going on Under the ground
We have all been here before We have all been here before
Perspective 1: We have all been here before
I remember a time, it must have been the early 1980s, when it was common to ban phones with direct dial facilities. Why? Because people might talk to their friends and family during work time. It took a while for firms to figure out that this was a stupid thing to do, but most carried on with a limited ban, usually on international direct dialling. That lasted a little longer. Then, by the early 1990s, when internet e-mail emerged, it too was banned. In fact there are stories about the banning of corporate e-mail as well, continuing into this century. Soon it was the turn of Instant Messaging to bear the wrath of Corporate Policy. Then came blogs and wikis and social software in general. Now it’s about social networking.
Since the year Dot, there have been organisational Grand Panjandrums seeking to stop people from “talking”. Because that’s what all this is. Conversation. Phones. E-mail. IM. Blogs. Wikis. Social networking. Conversations. That’s all.
Banning Facebook is the equivalent of banning coffee shops and water coolers and loos.
Knutr was exceptionally tall and strong, and the handsomest of men, all except for his nose, that was thin, high set, and rather hooked. He had a fair complexion none the less, and a fine, thick head of hair. His eyes were better than those of other men, both the more handsome and keener of sight.
Perspective 2: Playing King Canute is not a smart thing to do
Think about it. While we’ve had Flickr and YouTube and Netvibes, while we’ve had MySpace and Orkut and Bebo and CyWorld and whatever else, while we’ve had Plaxo and LinkedIn and XING, Second Life and World of Warcraft, this is the first time we’ve had quite such a hullabaloo about a social networking site. Surely that must tell us something?
Facebook is different. Especially for Generation M. [Or, if you prefer, Y].
Every day 100,000 people that we might want to hire sign up with Facebook. Soon they will be asking potential employers “What’s your Facebook policy?” and losing interest as we ruefully explain our troglodyteness.
This wave is not for turning back. So let’s ride it.
Nobody goes there any more. It’s too crowded.
Yogi Berra (1925- )
Perspective 3: Never drive dissent underground
It’s like having your teenaged children play at home. You know what they are doing. If you tell them to stop making a noise or kicking that ball, then they’re going to find somewhere else to play. Out of sight.
That’s what will happen if you drive Facebook out of the enterprise. They will go somewhere else. Some company else. So we should make the effort to encourage them to stay.
This is not about Enterprise Big Brother and spying on staff. It’s about common sense. The same reason companies have watercoolers and coffee drinking areas. Or cash dispensers. Or canteens. If you make it easier for people to go about their business, then they will produce higher quality work. Which brings me to my next point.
Ye shall know them by their fruits
Perspective 4: Concentrate on outputs
When you stop people from using things like Facebook, you are spending time concentrating on inputs rather than outputs. We do not live in a clocking-in environment any more. We need to continue to empower people, ask them to take responsibility and accountability for what they do, and to incentivise them on their performance. We should care about what people do, I am not preaching abdication of accountability for actions. We should care about how people do things, to ensure that they do things the right way. I am not preaching an “end – justifies – the – means ” approach. But what I am saying is:
Results matter, not efforts.
In a hurricane, build windmills
Ancient Chinese proverb
Perspective 5: When you can’t beat them, join them
A few months before I started this blog, I said: I believe that it is only a matter of time before enterprise software consists of only four types of application: publishing, search, fulfilment and conversation. I called them Four Pillars. When I look at Facebook, I see Four Pillars in action. I see Syndication of Content. I see Search. I see Fulfilment. And I see Conversation.
Imagine coming in to work, booting up your laptop and being presented with something akin to Facebook. Where, immediately, you see a bunch of news events about things at work you are interested in. Where you have one inbox for your mail, covering text and audio and video forms. Where you sign up to meetings you are interested in going to. Where you sign up to professional communities you are interested in belonging to. Where you can tell people what you are doing, and poll people to ask them their opinion on things. Where you can share information about the things you are working on.
Imagine being able to receive repeat mails only from people you have linked to; imagine being able to block mails from people. Imagine being given information as to which colleagues are online when. Imagine being able to search across people and projects and products and meetings and groups and events and whatever. Imagine knowing who is part of what in a timely and transparent way.
Imagine people building applications that solve real business problems and making those applications available to you, but at a time and place of your choosing. Imagine being able to find out which of your friends are using a given application, imagine being able to ask them their opinion about the application.
Imagine being able to do all this in a simple and open and transparent and collaborative way.
If you take the right perspective, there’s a lot you can do in an enterprise setting with Facebook. Who knows, maybe we shall soon see IT departments with a Facebook applications team embedded in them…..
Let’s harness the power of social networking tools, make them work for us in the enterprise.
I shall write more on Facebook in the enterprise, because I want to stimulate the right debates. In the meantime, I’d like to make three quick points:
- Facebook is open, it is porous at the edges. Enterprises need to embrace porousness, need to connect with their customers and their partners and their supply chain.
- Facebook is open, yet it is as private as you want to make it. Thankfully, it starts with an open rather than closed approach, but you have adequate control as to who can see what. Enterprises need to understand and adopt this Start-open-then-only-close-what-you-must mindset. It is an essential ingredient of collaboration, a spirit that every enterprise needs to foster.
- Facebook is open, yet with persistent searchable retrievable information and conversation. Enterprises need to understand and embed themselves into this record-everything-archive-everything-search-everything-retrieve-everything mindset.
I don’t have stock in Facebook, never had any. I’ve met Mark Zuckerberg briefly in 2004, that’s all. I will admit to having one friend who works for Facebook, but he was doing something else when I first met him (working for Apple). So I have no axe to grind.
There will be other Facebooks. Maybe there will be some who are better. That is not the point. The point is that enterprises can obtain real value from Facebook. But not by banning Facebook. Of course people need to behave responsibly, focusing on the outputs they are incentivised to create; this they will do; we should not assume that irresponsible behaviour by a few justifies punishment of the many. [It was this logic that was applied for the banning of international direct dial phone calls. Companies tended to bar such calls on most phones because of misuse and abuse by a very small portion of staff].
More to follow. Comments welcome.
Yes, you are right, banning is not the best strategy. But sometimes when something is addictive as FaceBook, it is nice not to be tempted :-)
I agree with everything you say except the openness of Facebook. I would love to go all-in, but…
It would be nice to see them at least throw us some openness bones: syndication feeds? openID?
Just something, anything, to help us believe that they aren’t evil.
Hlo, many thanks for this illuminating piece. Am going this evening for Bertie + Pink Noise concert.
Spot on.
Whether or not Facebook succeeds or not in infiltrating the enterprise, something like it will. Practically all enterprises need to communicate with the outside world, even the “inside world” now often consists of large numbers of “contract/free-agent” workers.
Like cities, companies have to move on from depending on their medieval walls for defence; the arrivals of cannon put an end to the concept of an enclosing defensive wall, out-sourcing and the internet is doing the same for the walled-off business.
Tom
I haven’t followed the ‘ban FB in the enterprise’ story, but of course it wouldn’t/doesn’t surprise me. A bunch of (mainly) old white men are going to be pretty annoyed by something that not only replaces – but is infinitely more powerful – their generation’s ‘FaceBook equivalent’…(the country club…) Ok that is admittedly a bit cynical, but probably not too far off the mark. Less provocatively put, most people over 40 grew up in a corporate and cultural paradigm predicated on ‘information is power’ but with a specific meaning: ‘information (I have but you don’t) is power’…The most successful at navigating this paradigm obviously rose to positions of control and are bloody loathe to see the carpet pulled out from under them.
All this reminds me of the witch burning scene from the Holy Grail:
The Witch: I’m not a witch I’m not a witch!
Sir Bedevere: But you are dressed as one
The Witch: *They* dressed me up like this!
Crowd: We didn’t! We didn’t…
The Witch: And this isn’t my nose. It’s a false one.
Sir Bedevere: [lifts up her false nose] Well?
Peasant 1: Well, we did do the nose.
Sir Bedevere: The nose?
Peasant 1: And the hat, but she is a witch!
Crowd: Yeah! Burn her! Burn her!
Sir Bedevere: Did you dress her up like this?
Peasant 1: No!
Peasant 3, Peasant 2: No!
Peasant 3: No!
Peasant 1: No!
Peasant 3, Peasant 2: No!
Peasant 1: Yes!
Peasant 2: Yes!
Peasant 1: Yeah a bit.
Peasant 3: A bit!
Peasant 1, Peasant 2: A bit!
Peasant 2: a bit
Peasant 1: But she has got a wart!
Random Person in the crowd: *cough* *cough*
Looks like when you left Dresdner you took all the common sense with you.
Oh, and I agree with Kevin about the openness (or otherwise) of the platform.
Hi JP, hope you are well and enjoying the cricket.
I think what scares corporations about FB isn’t just that they Don’t Get It, although it is clear that they don’t: amazingly a mutual friend at a Tier1 Bank told me it was banned on the basis of being a ‘Dating Site’.
The thing that can and should scare them is that it is Persistent Public Media.
With a better (‘enterprise’) security policy, the combination of trust network and applications enables a killer solution to the Attention Deluge. If anyone can enrich data with real semantics and then deliver that data to exactly the people they want to, then we can finally clear out our Inboxes…
Hi JP. I agree entirely with your points about Facebook and the parallels with past bannings – we really do have to trust people in our business. Why? They put enough discretionary effort over and above the pay check so why not throw them a little something that they can keep in touch with their own life whilst at work. At that points goes equally for business worki lie and personal.
I’m proud to say my organisation has seen the way, partly due to our enlightened CEO insisting we use the web the way our customers do. Soon many social networking sites and webmail will be available to all our employees – just like at home.
And already I see some naysayers pigeon holing Facebook (and its equivalents) as dating – just as Alexis says.
For every naysayer there will be 99 who will embrace the change and thrive on it – for work productivity and commitment to an employer who trusts them.
There is one point and it echos that of IDD – cost. To support such a move needs an investment in bandwidth and securing technologies. So just as firms footed the bill for IDD calls or personal calls, is now the time to foot the bill for open internet access? My firm believes so. Will everyone’s?
I continue to be amazed at the ramparts erected by denizens of the objective world in their efforts to deny the existence of the social world! OF COURSE Facebook is a dating site; and, as those of us who have studied the phenomena know, dating in virtual worlds can get just as hot and heavy as it does in the physical world! However, over in that physical world, BARS are dating sites also. Is there anyone out there in the world of enterprise workers who has NOT conducted business in a bar at one time or another? The problem with virtual worlds is that we get so wrapped up in all the evangelical jargon about them that we forget about some of the simple realities of the physical world!
It gets better. Stick with the fact that a particular virtual environment IS primarily a dating site. Can any enterprise worker claimed to have worked for an organization that never had even the slightest brush with sexual harassment? Like it or not, the office is a dating site, too; and, until we finally invent a realistic approximation to Huxley’s soma to regulate the libido, it is going to stay that way!
This brings me to Alexis’ dream of enriching “data with real semantics.” Inveterate Wittgensteinian that I am, I believe that the only “real semantics” reside in how we USE those data, whether they are texts, records in a database, or cells in a spreadsheet. The corollary is, as we all know, that, as our situation changes, we use those texts, records, and spreadsheets in different ways. That applies to workplace talk as well as everything else; and anyone with an ounce of literary sensibility can recognize when seemingly objective “work talk” is also sending out “mating dance” signals!
Those who react to these plain truths in horror remind me of those who want to achieve on zero-level probability of a terrorist attack in their community. This is an unrealistic goal. The less hysterical policymakers in “homeland security” have long argued that one should strive for a ROBUST environment, capable of quick RECOVERY from catastrophe (whether caused by terrorists or forces of nature). This is still a tall order, but it is at least within the realm of possibility!
Personally, I just try to avoid talking too much in either virtual worlds OR bars. This is not because of any puritan streak. I just bear in mind that WHEREVER I am talking, my texts can have consequences. So I prefer to generate texts in setting where I can review them (as I plan to do with this comment after I complete it)!
Thanks for all the comments, guys. As I said in my last post, I intend to carry on with the theme, touching on Facebook and Knowledge Management, moving through to Facebook and Openness (picking up the comments on RSS and OpenId) and moving on to Facebook and Four Pillars. You have been warned.
Hmm. Isn’t the issue (in heavily-regulated industries at least) that unmonitored conversations might be illegal conversations?
Yes, Facebook will have a history of conversations but they are not obliged to reveal them to European regulators.
If I wanted to do some insider trading there are plenty of channels I could use, of course. But the people whose job it is to protect their companies from accusations of improper activity might be excused for blocking the most obvious channels.
I’m on your side here: I think Facebook et alii would do more good than harm if they were made widely available, but I think the motive for blocking them might be regulatory pressure as well as, as you say, Theory Y management.
The regulatory issue is something I spent time labouring over; you make a good point. I still think the world beyond facebook is big enough and wild enough to be the proverbial barn door, while facebook is no more than an attic window.
Think about how e-mail entered regulated environments and how it gets managed and you will get my drift.
Wallace Stevens, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, stanza V:
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.
=====
There’s so much in this post and in the comments that it’s hard to know where to start. Let’s start with the inflection, and come back to the innuendo later.
First off, JP, I think you’ve done a great job articulating the reasons that we are foolish to deny our employees access to sites like Facebook for maintaining their social connections outside of work. But I’m more interested in how we could harness social networking like Facebook to enable business value, than just in the reasons we ought to allow employees to use it for non-business purposes.
Self-selected, ad-hoc social networks formed around business interests could have tremendous value for sharing tips and tricks, pushing corporate education or incentive plans, tracking performance and egging each other on through peer pressure, etc, etc, etc. I’m thinking dimensions like:
* What products am I focused on selling or servicing?
* What customer segments am I targetting?
* What “diversity” or other special interest groups do I personally identify with
Facebook-like functionality inside the firewall. That way you avoid the regulatory tangle of unmonitored conversations.
Will we have social network groupings inside the firewall that are unrelated to work? Only if we’re actually being effective. And that doesn’t bother me so much. The connections amongst our workforce are critical, even when they aren’t specifically work related.
This is related to the concept of IT Consumerization. As employees have these capabilities in their regular lives, freely available on the internet, they will come to expect them in their professional lives. The folks we most want to recruit are probably the same ones that are most able to leverage these technologies to improve their performance.
Far more than “what’s your facebook policy?” will be the question “how can I possibly make all the connections I need to make, and learn all the things I need to know, without effective support from IT infrastructure.” That, I believe, will be a more critical question our potential hires are asking us in the future.
Bill, I like your comment; but you raise an interesting point with your final paragraph. How many of us in the workplace ever give serious reflection (as if we had the time to do so) on what we REALLY need? Put another way, how much of what we THINK we need is a result of external sources (such as IT vendors) telling us what we SHOULD need, with little (if any) awareness of what we actually DO?
We know the old joke that only one other profession refers to its customers as “users;” but it is worth taking the connotation seriously. Our dependence on technology IS addictive, the addiction inflates our sense of what we need, and those needs can only be satisfied by more technology. Isn’t something wrong with this picture?
Once upon a time we could make our connections and learn what we needed through the right mix of social and cognitive skills. Some of those skills we required through education (beginning in kindergarten), some we required through our work practices, and some we just picked up fortuitously. Nevertheless, I suspect that the “old ways” of satisfying our needs had a lot more permanence than the “new ways” supported by IT infrastructure. We used to call that kind of permanence “experience;” and we valued it. Unfortunately, as I tried to argue on my own blog yesterday, the “Age of Agile” no longer provides room for that particular value; and I, for one, see that as a bug rather than a feature:
http://therehearsalstudio.blogspot.com/2007/07/can-anyone-do-anything-about-pathology.html
I must apologize for “homonymic error;” in that last comment, change “required” to “acquired!”
Stephen,
As therehearsalstudio is blocked at work, I’m looking foward to getting home to read your take on the Age of Agile.
I definitely connect with your concern about putting ourselves on the never-ending escalator of ever-increasing desires masquerading as needs. And isn’t it strange when a tool, by providing us a basic capability, only serves to make us imagine and then suddenly “need” even higher levels of function?
I think, in defense of the value of social networking tools, that during your “once upon a time” — when basic etiquette, curiousity, and conversational skills sufficed to let us meet and learn and succeed — the pace of change was much slower, the size of the group we were learning from was much smaller, and the hierarchies were much more structured.
I don’t want to make too grandiose a comparison, but perhaps a parallel could be drawn to the development of written language? Suddenly much larger and more complex social networks were possible (for a whole host of reasons) and before long civilizations needed written language to survive.
For what it’s worth, my own experience of working with collaborative tools like wiki’s is that they allow you to work with a group more productively and rapidly than you would have ever believed possible. Whether newer generation tools such as Facebook are augmenting our core capabilities or just providing social bling and an interesting time waster, it is too soon to measure empirically. But my bet would be that people will find ways to extract critical value from the new networking opportunities that are opened up.
Hi JP,
My first post here–I’ve enjoyed reading along the last few weeks since meeting you at the Web 2.0 conference. The Facebook conversation seems to continue right where we concluded in New York.
The constant talk amongst MBA interns this summer is about who works hard and who doesn’t. Those with jobs that don’t inspire or provide challenge or growth spend their time talking constantly about how little work they do. One intern said that he’s so bored that he has “read the entire internet”. Facebook is just another way to procrastinate if you want to procrastinate. As you say, to ban Facebook is to ignore the real problem–your employees are not motivated, challenged, mentored, etc. The funniest part is that these interns are disproportionately from firms that monitor internet usage or have explicitly banned Facebook. I still hear from them constantly through Facebook–they have simply moved over to Facebook mobile. To think, they are spending more time on Facebook because they are slowly typing away on their cell phones…
Those that are inspired only check in late at night–they look forward to catching up…at the end of the summer. They love their jobs and enjoy devoting their mindshare to their work. They still check facebook, but rarely spend much time on it. A disproportionate # of them come from start-ups–an environment devoid of corporate monitoring yet high on inspiration and responsibility.
Facebook hits business school this year. At the beginning of this past year, very few in business school had been on Facebook and nobody cared. Our average age is 27 and we had already graduated college when Facebook launched. This upcoming class of MBA’s were seniors in college in 2003, when Facebook launched. They are arriving at business school fully networked. At our school, the incoming class bypassed our school’s official class webboard (which is monitored by the deans) and started their own private Facebook group where they speak freely. The question, ‘does X firm allow Facebook’ will be a defining question as students talk to students during Fall recruiting…
I don’t think I’ve had this many comments this quickly for anything else; thanks for making the effort, I think we all have something to learn from what’s unfolding here.
Facebook, Linkedin, Ning, Xing and the hundreds of others I get invited to are all creating simply way to much noice and interruptions which steal my most valable asset, Time!
I research and analyze this space and IMHO convergence can’t happen face enough. Sooner than later I’ll have my personal network portal where I control what network interfaces with MY network and what content I want in MY network. I write extensive about these emergence at my blog titled “The Relationship Economy” at http://jayderagon.com/blog/
Bill, I am a bit amused (but not surprised) that my blog should be blocked where you work! Your comment about “the pace of change,” however, reminded me that last April Ellen Goodman wrote a column (which I found on Truthdig) entitled “The Benefits of Slow Journalism.” I discussed this on my own blog and related the passing of slow journalism to the erosion of our capacity to reflect on both what we read and what we write:
http://therehearsalstudio.blogspot.com/2007/04/world-without-reflection.html
I personally believe that the transition from oral to written ENHANCED our capacity for reflection, leading to such practices as educational methods that are still valid today. When one moves from the individual to the group, the capacity for reflection can go either way. It can be eroded by groupthink or enhanced by the “wisdom of the crowd.” Which way it actually goes depends on factors of social context that continue to be ignored by those whom I previous called the “denizens of the objective world!”
Stephen,
Yes, I think they block *.blogspot.com (which, let’s face it, is a pretty broad brush).
I agree completely with your concern about the loss of time for reflection and the risk of Continuous Partial Attention syndrome.
Slow Journalism sounds reminiscent of the Slow Food movement, one that I definitely connect with.
Your first comment on this post was one that especially drew my attention. I strongly agree that the truly interesting metadata is that which is generated by how we use the underlying data (or documents), not that which someone THINKS will be important about the underlying data (or documents). I am not so familiar with what Wittgenstein had to say on the subject, but I think that this is why the PageRank rankings made Google such a richer search mechanism, and why folksonomies are so important.
On a parallel track, this is closely related to one of the key reasons I am such a strong proponent of emergent software designs. Big Design Up Front always leads you to create overly complex and difficult structures. Simplest thing that could possibly work, then enhnace as you add actual user-driven requirements, is a much more effective approach.
But now I’ve wandered very far from the question of Facebook and the Enterprise, haven’t I? :)
Awesome awesome post – was going to blog indepth on corporates allowing social networks, but shan’t bother now. I’ll just link here. :)
BTW, Facebook DOES have RSS. Its just not turned on automatically. It’s under Privacy somewhere… try reading the stuff I wrote in the Facebook Group FACEBOOK IS/NOT A WALLED GARDEN, if you can’t find it on your profile.
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=3585827110
Thanks. Still working on what I expect will be my last post on this subject for now, I look forward to hearing from all of you once I publish it.
JP, great post, and it made me wonder why companies don’t trust their employees. I consult to CMOs and try to get them excited about collaborating with their customers, but companies don’t trust their customers. Does that mean that companies aren’t trustworthy?
You are so right about the output.. this is a vital part of the industrial->knowledge economy shift. We can largely jettison the hierarchy necessitated by industry, the assembly line. Let people get things done and let organization be emergent. As long as we have governance and goals, things will work out great.
Thanks for an awesome post.
Here’s a recent one of mine you might like:
Geography 3.0, What It Is and What It Means
http://tinyurl.com/5mudvr
Cheers
Regarding Facebook, I am truly amazed how many out there think that it is OK for this to be installed on your computer at work.
I am a manager, and in my style, I give poeple plenty of latitude-I am not in the habit of checking on them all the time. Over that last six months or so , it has started to be a serious problem.
Employees that we count on to use their brains (code writers and developers) , are allowing themselves to be interupted incredibly oftem – one guy it seems gets an interruption every 15 minutes. What is galling (about this particular person) , is that , when I am in the middle of discussing a complex technical issue with him , a flag pops up on his computer and he taps out a response immediatly as I am talking with him!! Obviously, we have a huge problem here.
In my partners business he recently sent out an email to all – anyone found with this software on their PC will be terminated.
I dont want to go this far (as firing someone for this), but I am at the end of my rope, and will lower the boom real soon (in a kinder and gentler way).
Facebook is for losers —get a life for yourself, and dont bother people at work with inane time wasting nonsense. Do it at home.
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