Bill Ives, who posts at the FastForward blog and also writes the excellent Portals and KM, has just informed us that "Serena Has Adopted Facebook as their Intranet." Ives’s post talks both about how and why Serena Software made this leap, and is the kind of blogging that inspires hard thinking. You should go read it, now.
When I wrote about the business value of social networking software like Facebook here and here I did not envision that it could be a viable foundation for a corporate Intranet (whatever that word means these days). Which illustrates, I guess, the difference in imagination between technology entrepreneurs and technology academics.
Large portions of the Intranet of Avenue A | Razorfish, a company of more than 1000 people, are built on MediaWiki‘s open source code. Serena, a company of 800 people with operations in 18 countries, now uses Facebook for its Intranet. I’ll bet than in both cases users were happier with the 2.0 versions than with their predecessors. And I’d be astonished if the new versions weren’t much cheaper than the old.
So what are the good reasons for continuing to invest in and forge ahead with 1.0 Intranets? This is a serious question, and I’d love to hear people’s experiences and opinions. It’s hard to argue that software foundations like MediaWiki and Facebook won’t scale. So are they lacking in some important functionality? If so, both platforms are extensible by developers. Are companies afraid that externally maintained and hosted software like Facebook will suddenly go dark, or that its managers will decide to change it in such a way as to make it useless for corporate purposes? This is plausible, but the same caution, as far as I can tell, should apply to all software as a service offerings.
Is it security? If so, could you please be as specific as possible about the nature of the security concerns? I hear that word used pretty frequently by people who advocate caution or skepticism with Enterprise 2.0 tools and approaches, but when I probe I often find nothing more than general unease. I have a hard time thinking of organizations with deeper and more legitimate security concerns than the CIA, FBI, ONI, DIA, and other entities now grouped under the Directorate of National Intelligence (DNI). Yet they’ve all deployed MediaWiki, blogging software, tagging software, and Google search as part of Intellipedia. If the DNI thinks the benefits of Enterprise 2.0 outweigh the costs and risks, including security risks, shouldn’t the rest of us feel a lot calmer about using these tools? And shouldn’t we take a good hard look at the popular and cheap platforms now available?
{ 31 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi Andrew,
This is not an either-or situation.
Some of the confusion probably arises from the uncertainty around “traditional” intranets. While most organisations have them, there is little opportunity to share approaches, or to understand “best practices”.
(This is something we’ve been doing a lot of writing on over the years.)
We’re now seeing wikis and social networking tools used as an intranet. That is, as a store of corporate knowledge, alongside the more direct collaboration use-cases.
In these situations, all the same “intranet” challenges must be addressed. Staff must be able to find information, it must be written and communicated in a useful fashion, search must work well, content must be kept up to date, etc, etc.
For example, I had the pleasure of seeing the Avenue A | Razorfish intranet when I was recently in New York. It’s great, and it’s only going to get better and better.
For all that, however, it’s already starting to feel crowded, confused and cluttered. There is a reliance on search, and as the volume of content grows, this will inevitably reduce in effectiveness. There is little information architecture, and this makes it hard to find key content.
All of these problems can be addressed, but only through the addition of “intranet” approaches. Including establishing a centralised team with overall ownership of the site’s IA, search, strategy, etc, etc.
So it comes down to a more nuanced “the more things change, the more they stay the same”, than just “why would we still do intranet 1.0″.
Social tools will change everything. But they will also leave the same core corporate needs, that must be addressed through good management. The real challenge is pencilling in some boundaries, and making sure that there are good connections across these pencil lines.
Happy to continue this conversation…
Cheers,
James
It depends on which E2.0 software we’re talking about. Most wikis can be secured behind a firewall, which is what most companies want so it’s not an issue.
You’d hardly call Facebook secure from an enterprise perspective if only because the company is selling the aggregated data for advertising purposes. There is no apparent distinction between data in private groups and that in the public gaze from that perspective.
I said a while back that FB is a great metaphor for what might be used behind the firewall but so far the company has shown little interest in taking up that idea.
Good question. Yes there’s a general fear. In my Global Intranet Strategies Survey conducted from June through August 2007, in the 2.0 section, the primary reason that 2.0 was not being tested in enterprises was “our culture is not ready”. 72% of the enterprises have implemented or are beginning to use 2.0 tools on intranets (out of 178 companies from around the world of all sizes from 1000 to over 100,000 employees). Out of 51 who responded to the question “why not?”, 38 gave the answer I quoted above.
Working with very large organisations on their intranets for a number of years, I totally understand why they are not evolving en masse to using wikis and Facebook type tools. An intranet landscape serves many purposes and many types of employees across many cultures. They are a source of reference information, offer links to employee self service and business application among other things. Their use as a “people-connecting tool”, and a place to build collaboration spaces can often be better served with 2.0 tools than traditional tools but migrating the whole intranet platform does not seem to be a realistic way to meet all needs in very large organisations.
That said, I think they would be doing much more if they realisd the potential.
One very large organisation has built an internal wikipedia which “lies on top of” the intranet, serving as a introductory layer of collective explanations and links to internal content and external content. It will be interesting to see if more and more content gradually moves to the wiki layer over time.
I presented a “Intranet 2.0 Maturity” – a summary of the 2.0 intranet data from my 2007 survey in a presentation I gave yesterday at Online Information in London. It can be downloaded from my web site in the documents section (www.netjmc.com/engl/doc001.html. It provides an insight into which tools are being adopted by companies, based on 178 organisations.
Final note: one interesting finding is that organisations where the intranet is “the way of working today” are adopting the tools faster than those who say the intranet is a couple years or more away from being “the way of working”.
Hi, is it any wonder that the chinese are hacking the worlds DNI equivalent systesm if they are using the likes of Facebook?? Its a joke!
I think on the surface it is the traditional arguments of security, control, backups, reliability, etc. All the usual concerns of a company.
However deeper I think it is really and understanding of what is going on. I think most management / executives / decision makers just barely understand the IT infrastructure they have and there is just too many unknowns to wrap their heads around with Enterprise IT 2.0.
There will be a saturation time period that will need to happen before more top level management feels warm and fuzzy about it.
Just my 3 cents….
What exactly does it mean for you to invest in 1.0 intranets? For all I know all major intranet software vendors are adopting 2.0 tools&practices, and migrations are taking place. Is it in-house hosting 1.0 for you?
Btw one feature I would miss going with facebook-like solutions would be MS Office integration, that you naturally get out of the box with Sharepoint for example.
What do they use for document-centric collaboration on Facebook? How are they managing payroll, staffing/recruiting, expense reimbursement? Is the product development organization running their product lifecycle processes through Facebook? I think a Facebook-like framework definitely has merit inside the firewall, and Facebook itself certainly has a more elegant approach to some things on traditional Intranets, but in many ways it’s a round hole for a square peg. Easier to create your own facebook-like framework (or get one off-the-shelf from many of the vendors entering this space), than it is to rebuild many of the core services most Intranets provide on Facebook’s platfrom, IMO. Bit of a red herring.
“So what are the good reasons for continuing to invest in and forge ahead with 1.0 Intranets? This is a serious question, and IÂ’d love to hear peopleÂ’s experiences and opinions… Is it security? If so, could you please be as specific as possible about the nature of the security concerns?”
Your argument loses some of its power here. There’s a major security issue with using a public site such as Facebook as a company intranet in that most if its traffic (though not login) is trasmitted in cleartext over HTTP. It’s relatively easy to snoop that data. Companies usually require secure VPN for remote access to the intranet so this problem is avoided. Further, if your competitor can accessing your intranet based on his knowledge of your login, and if he can use this from any comfortable location he chooses, then you have again a major security problem. This is why companies often use technologies like RSA’s SecurID, so that no one can carry the authentication information in their head.
The case that the CIA uses open Web 2.0 software isn’t related to the security concerns of the public internet. Though there are major governance issues to keep user-generated content appropriate in organizations.
Facebook is not a viable solution for mainline companies. Let them retool their offering for the corporation if that’s what people are interested in (e.g. give companies their own url such as https://myco.facebook.com, let the corporate administrator manage who can log in, let the corporate admin manage who they can be friends with, what applications they can add, what types of information can get into their news feed, offer a SecureID feature, etc.). Until then, serious companies should stay away.
Hi Andrew,
Great article — I’ve been enjoying reading your stuff for the past six months or so but this is the first time I’ve commented.
I think it’s really important to draw a distinction between using a Web 2.0 open source product (e.g. MediaWiki) as part of your corporate or government intranet vs. using Facebook, LinkedIn, Plaxo or some other public internet service *as* your intranet.
The fundamental difference is data ownership — even though the internet makes the location of your data almost transparent, large corporations and the government need to *own* their data. For most corporations, this means putting it — and keeping it — behind the firewall. For some ulta-paranoid government agencies, it means actually restricting certain data to private, closed networks which can’t even talk to their peer networks, let alone the internet.
What Serena is doing is the right idea, but the wrong execution. Same for any major company subject to SOX or HIPAA who uses Google documents — this model just doesn’t work. However, I strongly support using W2.0 open source software behind the firewall. It’s really a case of apples and oranges here and your article doesn’t draw a distinction between the two.
Now if only we had an “enterprise” edition of Facebook that you could install and run behind the firewall . . . then we could have the best of both worlds!
Best regards,
Chris Bucchere
http://thebdgway.blogspot.com
Andy – thanks for the recognition. As a relative youngblood coming onto the scene. I think it is more about personal beliefs than any corporate issue. The benefits, scalabity, and ease of use stand on their own.
It reminds me of the party I just came from. At the party a friend had an amazing game all about music. To play it a laptop was needed. When asking for a laptop most of the party crowd were affronted, like “leave work at work”. I was shocked, all of the parties i have been to since high school have had some sort of technology aspect to them.
It’s like when I was a kid playing video games and trying to convince my parents that they were of value. I get that same sort of feeling nowadays.
Older folks just don’t look at the web as a place for work. It is still the place for wasting time, browsing, and shopping. Yet it seems to be the direction that work is going. I mean can anyone imagine a knowledge worker, ten years from now not being connected?
I don’t think anyone can, but this generation of workers, baby boomers, and managers don’t see that…
P.S. Intellipedia is the wiki and the other tools are stand alone tools incorporated into the broader Enterprise 2.0 suite. The wikipedia page covers it pretty well.
James brings up valid points, and after all, he has spent much of his career assisting organizations with their Intranets (known in some circles as “The Intranet Guru” or as mentioned in Aarhus, Denmark at a cmf2007 gathering about a month ago, “The Intranet God” [a lesser known Norse god?]).
His worries are, essentially, mine as well. Self-organization and “emergence” are fine and well, and CAN work wonders, but they don’t ALWAYS do so.
Which is why (and yes, I beat this to death in my MOSS 2007 presentation James…), Intranets, whether 1.0, 2.0 or x.x, run a danger of the “kudzu factor” – where lack of information isn’t the problem, but TOO MUCH, and without organization of any kind.
I believe *a* key of Enterprise 2.0 is the ability for intelligence and organizing aspects to emerge from the actions of people (the social aspect), but while we’re providing that infrastructure, there is no good reason not to provide the OTHER and KNOWN TO WORK principles that drive sensible Information Architecture work.
Are traditional taxonomies slow to change, and (at times) painful to adapt? Yes, but stability = findability, and adding folksonomies/tagging supplements that with a more dynamic organizing mechanism, which can then be absorbed into the existing taxonomy (or more likely, loosely connected taxonomIES).
And while I appreciate that Facebook is becoming quite the platform, for many purposes, given “BeaconGate” and the amount of noise in general that is swarming onto the feed at Facebook, it might be hard (and potentially unsafe) to jump onto Facebook as your corporate intranet. Jump in if you like, but be aware of what you’re getting into.
Hi Andrew, I’m a new reader of your blog. I really enjoy reading your articles and I love your writing style.
Hi Andy,
As someone who’s been developing a Facebook application for a certain well-known university, I find an element of truth (with a caveat) to the notion that Facebook can be your Intranet platform. Facebook is really great at connecting your Facebook social graph with your institutional identities (departments, locations, project teams, course enrollment, etc).
From that, you can drive traffic to your institutional applications that handle the real business. Facebook will let you iFrame in limited views of these business apps, but the real value it provides is in connections and context, not content.
In the end, I don’t think Facebook replaces your intranet apps or even your portal, but it complements them. Even more complementary will be open and deeply integratable social-graph platforms like OpenSocial, should they gain traction.
I’ve written a follow up on my blog, Facebook and Academic Institutions – Content or Context?
–Larry
Interesting idea to use Facebook as the Intranet. But Chris already mentioned the problems for an enterprise regarding data ownership and also the security of intellectual property.
Using Facebook as the basis for an Intranet is much more interesting, especially with an integration of e. g. del.icio.us. So the associates could organize themselves in different groups e. g. sales, engineering, quality etc. and than they can search within the favorites saved in del.icio.us for this specific group in Facebook. So everybody has easy and fast access to relevant information concerning his work.
The main problem is only, how to convince the associates to collaborate and to offer information to others, because sometimes it is their capital for the job in the enterprise.
I have been reviewing a variety of search & content management solutions in my market intelligence role, and I have concluded that while there are some interesting entry-level solutions such as the Google mini and IBM’s new OmniFind/Yahoo! edition software, the security in them just don’t suffice and as you mention with Facebook, aren’t scalable.
Furthermore, while we could theoretically embed those solutions into an existing Sharepoint site (as we all know their search isn’t up to snuff, and from what I’ve read about their upcoming Express solution it still won’t be), that cobbled- together result wouldn’t be nearly as easy to use as a Facebook type solution.
What I settled on recommending was a Traction TeamPage FAST module solution, which has an amazingly easy to use interface with enterprise level security functionality, and it’s relatively inexpensive to implement. Furthermore, it requires very little IT support, which is key to my non-profit business. I first discovered Traction at the April SCIP conference in NYC, and have been working to make a business justification ever since.
I think it is this type of product — one that combines blog/wiki technologies with enterprise security needs that will ultimately “win” the content/knowledge management “war.”
I welcome any thoughts on Traction’s solutions (http://traction.tractionsoftware.com/traction). I have yet to know if it will pass my stakeholder’s collective muster…but my fingers AND toes are crossed!
Thanks for the interesting entry!
Andrew,
Serena is a company in the midst of significant change. To enable corporate transformation we needed a platform to communicate and collaborate with employees (as well as customers, partners, suppliers, friends and family) easily and often. It just happens that technology exists today that goes a long way towards solving this issue.
We would be happy to speak further about how as an organization we are adapting to a new way of working.
Kyle Arteaga
VP, Corporate Communications
Hi Andy,
I agree with Brian above. There will be no stopping the Chineese from hacking.
Hello Andrew,
IÂ’m student from UK currently studying the internet business course in London. I found this post to be very helpful and would like to share it with the people in my course, hope that’s ok with you.
This blog is bookmarked! Thank you
Andrew,
Our company of 2200 people uses Confluence for intranet. Our division locally used SharePoint before Confluence. Everybody misses SharePoint to be honest. My recent experience was that it took 1 month to develop a survey on internal infrastructure, while it takes one hour to do the same job on SharePoint. This is just a simple example of what is missing.
Facebook, or rather the facilities it has, are attractive as a means to fill one small slice of your intranet. Can it BE your intranet? Only as much as any other tool that lets you publish pages (pick up any blog or wiki).
National Health Service UK built a Traction TeamPage based intranet, and also relied on newsgator. They organized it nicely around departments and areas of interest. When folks start to navigate for information – that’s where they start, rather than starting with a human navigation approach. (that allows for following topics to people, not people to topics).
Facebook is good for what its best at: creating a personal profile and linking to people. The group model is not all too compelling so it doesn’t make the grade for group collaboration. The messaging model is OK but confusing (I never have a clue as to whether messages I post to people will be public or private).
Is facebook good for enterprise? Maybe in some other form. Web 2.0 gives us a glimpse of what we may want for Enterprise 2.0 – but not the reality. In the enterprise, the processes, needs and use cases are different than you see in social nets on the web.
— Jordan
Andrew – A long delayed thanks for the kind comments on my Serena post. It is December 23 and I am still seeing new people arrive on my blog from your post. I should check my stats more often. I have been a long admirer of your blog and your work. Bill Ives
A comment to James Robertson’s first post
>All of these problems can be addressed, but only >through the addition of “intranet†approaches. >Including establishing a centralised team with >overall ownership of the site’s IA, search, >strategy, etc, etc.
That reads like a demand for professional gardeners. A new role for the soon-to-be jobless intranet team?
-Stefan
I can’t even imagine using Facebook as an Intranet. It is already pushing too far into our personal data already!
Hi Andres!
I am a computer engineer in Vietnam. With my knowledge about computer science, I thought that It’s totally possible to integrate Facebook into Intranet, because Intranet use a protocol the same as Internet. So the problems with Facebook on Internet come with Facebook on Intranet, including security.
Using facebook as an intranet is a great idea. I think that facebook has proven to give us much more than just connect with our friends.
I could see a tool like this increasing productivity, collaboration, and teamwork among employees who are not physically located within 20 ft of each other, but I can see the corporate/firm hostility to this technology as well.
Most of the people making the decisions about implementation of software for communication may likely see facebook as an application that is a waste of time with no useful application in the workplace.
I canÂ’t even imagine using Facebook as an Intranet. It is already pushing too far into our personal data already!
You had me thinking if we can trust those cheap platforms, thanks for keeping us aware of things, you're really good at it.
Facebook is a nice option for good social networking.
Facebook is a nice option for good social networking.
Thank you for updating us…