I recently attended “Enterprise 2.0 – The evolution of collaboration in your business”, an Ark Group conference looking at how the collaborative technologies underlying Web 2.0 can be used within organisations. There was a good mix of attendees, with a few from legal, but others from the pharmaceutical, media, communications, finance and other sectors. There were some very interesting presentations and discussions, which highlighted that the extent to which the various tools could be utilised, seemed to depend to a large degree on the sector and type of organisation; for example, sections of the Media are very much at the “bleeding edge” in using social tools to engage their customers, while other firms were largely focussed on the use of blogs and wikis to enable internal knowledge sharing and community building.

Treat external networks with caution

My own presentation was slightly off topic in that it was about “Assessing the impact of external social networking on your business”, focussing on external third party Web 2.0 sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn and so on.

In contrast to some of the other presenters, I took a somewhat sceptical line towards sites such as Facebook as a business tool, which seemed to polarise opinion. While I am a cheerleader for social software within the organisation, and have been involved with implementing team blogs and wikis at my previous and current firms, I am not convinced that some of popular external social networking sites provide sufficient benefit for businesses to justify the risks. In my view, many external social networking tools are just that – external to organisations, and “social” rather than business tools. While tools such as LinkedIn or Naymz are very much targeted towards the business user, providing fairly sober systems for business networking, Facebook is a social tool, and allows users to post photos, videos etc, download applications and join groups, usually just for fun.

There are a variety of risks associated with such tools, around, for example, privacy (people giving away so much information about themselves they leave themselves open to fraud or identity theft) and security (downloading applications that may contain viruses or malware). In addition, content entered into the system is held by a third party, and as in the case of Facebook, when you tick the “I Agree” box, the terms and conditions grant them rights to re-use your content unless you choose to opt out. These tools also have the potential to impact on productivity, and according to some surveys, the UK is losing tens of billions of pounds every year as a result.

From the IT perspective, they also are a drain on resources; for many UK law firms that allow it, Facebook is the most visited site, uses the most bandwidth and causes an increase in already large volumes of emails due to the alerts it sends. It is also the case that we really don’t know how long these sites will last, so investing time and effort in finding ways to use them may well be wasted in the longer term. For example, Friendster was the social networking site du jour a few years ago, but is no longer so popular in the UK, and both MySpace and Facebook membership numbers have dipped in recent months. While these sites will continue to evolve to try to keep their users, people can be fickle, and tend to move on to the next big thing when it comes along.

Deny access?

There is an argument that is often put forward when discussing Web 2.0 that you have to let staff use all of these tools in the workplace, otherwise you won’t attract the best young graduates, who eat, sleep and breathe this stuff. The tools are so interwoven into their lives, the argument goes, that if they can’t continue to use them when they get to the workplace, they won’t want to work for you and will go elsewhere. The topic was discussed at the conference at the opening panel session, and speakers talked about how “wired” and “online” we all are now, and that preventing people using the technologies they’re familiar with is standing in the way of progress.

My slightly cynical view of this was that there are all sorts of things people do in their own time that they don’t get to do when they come to work, and this isn’t necessarily any different. One of the attendees likened blocking Facebook to “banning the telephone when it was introduced”, which seemed a little extreme, not to say misplaced. Banning the internet at work would certainly be like banning the telephone, whereas blocking Facebook would, I’d suggest, be more like blocking premium rate chat phone lines, which most firms do. There is certainly the question of trust, but many firms who otherwise have an ethos of trust and openness have also taken the step of banning Facebook. It could be argued that someone who doesn’t have enough work to do will just find some other way of wasting their time like playing Solitaire on their PC. However, due to its nature, Facebook can be addictive, with email alerts sent every time one of your friends updates their status or writes on your “wall”, which can have the effect of quite literally “poking” the user regularly and drawing them back to the site.

Many of the speakers agreed that at the end of the day, a blog or a wiki is just another available tool that can be used if appropriate. However, the “just another tool, only use if appropriate” attitude did not seem to be extended to Facebook. There seemed to be a view that because Facebook has 66 million users worldwide, it must somehow be incredibly useful to established businesses and can’t be ignored. I would agree that it shouldn’t be ignored – it has been a phenomenal success story that has changed the landscape of the web – and to some it may indeed be a useful tool. I am not anti-Facebook per se, just unconvinced that it offers anything substantial to law firms at present other than risks and technical headaches. It is also true that there are no doubt useful ways for firms to use it – for example, keeping in touch with Alumni. I’m also well aware that in an area such as this, the technology and what it enables are changing every day, so I am prepared to eat my words when Facebook comes up with the “killer app” that businesses truly need. However, it is my view that the true impact of these sites on traditional businesses (including law firms) in terms of usefulness will only truly be seen when they can be secured in some way within the governance of the organisation.

Secure versions

Many organisations are taking elements of the Facebook system and developing their own internal versions, while some third party providers are looking to try to provide a layer of security on top of it. An example of the latter is the recently released “overlay” application for Facebook, called WorkBook, which allows an organisation to take advantage of the social networking capabilities of Facebook, but to ring-fence the content within the enterprise perimeter to prevent privacy and data leaks. I’m aware this may sound like a killjoy attitude and very much against the openness ethos of Web 2.0, but “Enterprise 2.0” is all about taking the best from Web 2.0, while still protecting the concerns and meeting the requirements of the business. A very recent example of an analogous development in the virtual world is the announcement that IBM is working with Linden Labs on a secure version of Second Life behind its firewall, to allow its globally dispersed employees to meet in the virtual world securely and privately, without fear of confidential information leaking out or being the target of attacks. Many businesses are hesitant in embracing Web 2.0 for very valid reasons, some of which have been outlined above. Web 2.0 has certainly lowered the barriers to entry, with open source technologies that can be easily and quickly implemented with minimum technical knowledge. However, in order to make Enterprise 2.0 a reality, mature and secure systems will be required; the IBMs and Microsofts of the world are slowly catching up to these technologies and their influence will continue to be felt in the enterprise going forward as they become built into the fabric of enterprise applications.

Who contributes?

Another topic covered in my talk, which I think is an interesting facet of Web 2.0 and social software, was contribution of content. The nature of external social networking is that it is “me-focussed”: my profile page is all about me and what I’m doing, and I’m letting all my friends know about it and seeing what they’re up to. However, it is interesting to compare the level of contribution in social networking sites with that in the more altruistic endeavours such as Wikipedia. A US study found that 77 per cent of users of online social networking sites created content, as against figures for Wikipedia for a period (taken a couple of years ago admittedly), where 70 per cent of the content was created by 1.8 per cent of the users. The motivation to update your profile on Facebook is quite high – it is an easy way to share what you’ve been doing and thinking with friends; it’s a fun and social environment. Contributing to a third party system on a more abstract topic takes more effort and commitment and the motivation is just not the same.

I am also interested in the accepted wisdom that the younger generations are more technically-savvy and switched on; that is true to a point, but not to the extent that it is often portrayed. Surveying trainees at our firm, I found that, for example, although a reasonable percentage had used social networking tools (some answered that they used to but no longer did), only a very small percentage had used a wiki. Another speaker at the conference, from a large multinational corporation, talked about how they had commissioned research to find out about the media- and tech-savvy generation, only to be told that it didn’t exist; some people of every generation enthusiastically embrace new technology, but it is not the preserve of youth. If we bring this back to the Enterprise 2.0 discussion, this may indicate that while perhaps the younger generations (“Generation Me”, or “the Millenials”) are more IT-literate and comfortable with the fast-paced world of social networking, they might still lack the confidence to contribute to a blog or wiki within the workplace, where the content will be judged by their bosses and co-workers.