It has come a full circle. Just a few years back, AnnaLee
Saxenian, professor of University of California, Berkley, studied the success of
immigrant entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, and concluded that their natural
ability to network socially was a major reason behind their success.
Social networking was not such a hot phrase when Prof Saxenian
attributed Indians success to it. Times have changed. Social networking has
become the biggest idea on the Internet since then.
Social networking as a manifestation of Web 2.0 technology is
not only about popular sites like Orkut, Facebook, Linkedin and others that have
given freedom to users to connect socially. Utility of social networking as a
business tool for enterprises has been debated for the last several years. Most
companies that viewed social networks as a time waster are now waking up to
leverage the opportunities they offer in terms of productivity.
Info-Tech Research Group suggests there are companies that are
not objecting to their employees accessing these sites from office. The data
goes on to suggest that only 46% IT heads in the 200 companies were for blocking
access to these sites. In fact, 3% companies were found to encourage their
employees to be part of social networking sites. This is also a fact that most
employees are members of popular social networking sites, but most of the
information shared on this is a mix of personal, professional, and, at times,
non-serious in nature. This is further substantiated by a global study of CEOs
done by IBM Institute of Business Value which showed that 75% CEOs considered
collaboration was one of the key factors that would help them to innovate.
Cisco CEO John Chambers believes that social networking concepts
are very relevant for enterprises. "Many of the things that our children
and consumers started such as the wikis, the wikipedia, and YouTube will now go
into the business. We think that will drive a decade of productivity."
The Relevance
Companies have started seeing value in having an infrastructure within the
company that allows its employees to collaborate and use it as a tool for
furthering their professional needs and requirements. Talking about the
relevance, Jai Ganesh, head, Web 2.0, Infosys, which has created www.infosysblogs.com
for information sharing, says, "Organizations are increasingly looking at
social networking as an effective mechanism to encourage formal as well as
informal collaboration, knowledge transfer across geographically distributed
employees, and discussions with partners and the community at large."
Embracing Web 2.0 |
||
Akshay Aggarwal, head, Systems Engineering, BEA Systems India |
Sanjay Manchanda, director, Information Worker Business Group, Microsoft India |
Chetan Yardi, country manager, Lotus, SWG, IBM India |
Chetan Yardi, country manager, Lotus, SWG, IBM India, sees this
in the context of changing demographics within an organization: "The
demographics of the workforce in enterprises have been changing from what it was
ten years ago. Most industries are doing well and they are hiring in large
numbers. On one hand there are new recruits who are very young and on the other
are very senior people with very rich functional and technical expertise. This
is where we see the Web 2.0 in the form of social networking or social software
helping people make connections cutting across hierarchy." Echoing a
similar sentiment, Akshay Aggarwal, head, Systems Engineering, BEA Systems,
says, "The idea behind Web 2.0 is that people should contribute and share
information which earlier used to reside in their desktops and is now available
to the world outside. They can interact with the outside world to see what kind
of inputs or feedback is coming in."
Says Sanjay Manchanda, director, Information Worker Business
Group, Microsoft India, "The reason why the concept of social networking
has been lapped up by enterprises is that wikis and blogs are so easy to use in
terms of publishing. It doesnt require any training."
Bringing Web 2.0 to Intranet
Intranet has been there in most companies for a long time, but there were
doubts on its efficiency. It remained a resource pool of static content relating
to the companys policies. It was rarely used as a medium of collaboration
among employees.
But, things have started changing with several companies
embracing Web 2.0 technologies to overhaul their Intranets to make it more
collaborative and useful. Efforts have already started to show results. For
example, Infosys Intranet, called Sparsh, won the Nielson Norman Award 2007
for being one of the top 10 Intranet sites in the world. Sparsh connects about
69,000 employees across eighteen countries and has become the primary networking
for Infosys employees. For the external world, there is Infosysblogs.com,
whose tagline is "discuss the business of technology and the technology of
business in the flat world". With more collaboration tools being added onto
the Intranet, drastic cut down on number of face-to-face meetings could happen.
Alternatives to Intranets
A recent study by IDC India revealed that out of around seventy Web 2.0
companies, more than fifty-five have a consumer focus, while a select twelve
show varying degrees of enterprise focus. Websites like Zoho, Cynapse, Techtribe,
and Uhuroo are among the few sites that have a considerable degree of enterprise
or business focus. These companies offer hosted services to companies that want
to avoid spending on the existing or new Intranets to connect their employees by
going in for the hosted model. There is a heated debate regarding whether social
networking sites like Facebook can act as an Intranet for companies. In fact,
most recently, the US-based Serena Software announced that its 800 employees
around the globe would participate each week in a company-wide program, called
"Facebook Fridays".
Googles Gameplan
Googles social networking site, Orkut, has caught everybodys
imagination through its features and ease of use. It does have several community
profiles, which are around companies, technologies, etc. Google has managed to
diversify its offerings to include Google Apps, which offers communication and
collaboration tools to publish information in a hosted environment. In a
nutshell, Google has integrated offerings for enterprises. Googles Blogspot,
though hosts several blogs set up by the employees of the companies based in
India, refused to participate in this story and share their perspective on Web
2.0 and its plans for enterprises in India.
The changing face of some |
Satyam: The blog platform at Satyam "enables associates to share best practices/ideas, and express opinions"
Satyam Computer Services: SatyamWorld
Cognizant: Cognizant
Tata Interactive Systems: It
TCS: The
Wipro: The |
Addressing Security Issues
The fear of leaking of confidential company information is the biggest fear
among enterprise managers. According to Sanjay Manchanda of Microsoft,
"Security can be looked at from two angles. One is a customer facing blog
and on the internal side, the worry is more about the ability to publish any
info to the outside world. The issues are more around managing the content for
accuracy and avoiding a situation where customers or other people are misled
through these blogs. The administrator can control the accounts and information
that is published and monitor who gets to see what and also whether they can
contribute or not. Not everybody has access to the same set of
information." He adds that some companies even encourage free sharing of
information or airing of opinion that may be, at times, in conflict with the
companys official position. This gives a lot of credibility to the blogs.
The Vendor Landscape
Traditionally, Microsoft has had the largest mindshare of offerings in the
form of MySite, which allowed companies to set up an Intranet through the portal
site in which employees could collaborate with co-workers. Microsoft has managed
to gain a good market share for its product, SharePoint Server 2007, which
includes capability to create blogs, wikis, chatterbox ajaxs, and tag clouds.
IBM launched social software, called Lotus Connections, in June 2007. The
product allows creation of profiles, communities, blogs, dogear, and activities
for organizing work and utilizing the professional network.
BEA, on the other hand, has also entered the fray with what it
calls enterprise social computing products which revolve around BEA AquaLogic
Pages, BEA AquaLogic Ensemble, and BEA AquaLogic Pathways. These products are
aimed at collaboration and social software to improve knowledge, worker
productivity, and user-driven innovation.
SAP is collaborating with Microsoft to offer Web 2.0 solutions.
Networking leader Cisco is also making forays ,and offers software platforms to
enable social networking sites besides focus on unified communications. Then
there are companies like Awareness, Jive, Near-Time Socialtext, and Six Apart
that are offering hosted environments for enterprises to start collaborating.
The Outlook
The trend of enterprises opening their doors to Web 2.0 is likely to
accelerate due to obvious business advantages and productivity tools that it
offers. There are even suggestions that traditional Intranets days are
numbered and that it will finally get integrated with new set of tools that Web
2.0 offers. One thing is clear that for the next few years it would be
technology companies that will be the early adopters of this technology due to
the urgent need to harness the domain capabilities of their employees spread
across various geographies and their collaborative culture as well as comfort
with technology per se.
Sudesh Prasad
sudeshp@cybermedia.co.in