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It’s a humble appliance, but, without it, workplace culture doesn’t stand a chance. It’s the water cooler, where employees meet to open up about themselves and their work.
But as companies disperse operations globally and encourage employees to telecommute, the old-time water cooler is getting to be a lonely place. What’s needed is a virtual water cooler-a browser-based application that will enable employees to easily find each other to exchange information and advice.
The concept isn’t new. Facebook, LinkedIn and others have been connecting people for years. But many companies frown on or even ban usage of these potentially distracting and insecure tools during company time. In their place, enterprises are running applications with similar capabilities securely behind their corporate firewalls.
“Document-centric collaboration by itself just isn’t enough. You need to have something people-oriented right alongside it,” said Oliver Young, an analyst at Forrester Research.
Gartner analyst Carol Rozwell said businesses are clamoring for this kind of software, which straddles the categories of social networking and enterprise learning. “There is pent-up demand among learners for easy-to-use tools that simplify the process of connecting a person with the need to know to a person who knows,” said Rozwell.
Social media expert and author Paul Gillin concurred. “Formerly, people were forced to give up their knowledge, but with social networks, people willingly give up their knowledge. The great business opportunity is behind the firewall because simple tools can be used to replace more complicated collaboration tools,” said Gillin.
Although Facebook and LinkedIn have so far avoided tailoring their products for corporate use, other vendors-ranging from collaboration software giants Microsoft and IBM to obscure startups to established wiki vendors-are scrambling to fill the void.
In fact, Gartner estimated annual spending on enterprise social software to be $280.2 million in 2007, increasing to $1.06 billion in 2012.
The Need to Connect
The Need to Connect
Sabre Holdings, a provider of travel industry technology and services, was feeling the pain of corporate dispersal. In a short time, the company’s employees based in the United States plummeted from 85 percent to 45 percent. If that weren’t enough, Sabre launched a liberal telecommuting policy. And when employees did come to the office, they were allowed to work at any cubicle.
“All these things made it harder for employees to find each other and find expertise,” said Sabre’s Erik Johnson. In response, Sabre assigned some of its developers to cook up a social networking platform, which became known as Cubeless. Launched internally as “Sabre Town” in 2007, the networking tools were at first focused on the exchange of travel tips among employees who were frequently on the road. In January, Sabre’s Cubeless unit began commercially marketing the underlying technology.
“Consumer applications are not appropriate for business,” said Johnson, who is the general manager for Cubeless. “There are very specific things we’ve done in Cubeless that make it work in the enterprise. It’s not a consumer application.”
One difference: While social network users are accustomed to having a friends list, there is no such thing in Cubeless. To permit the gathering of groups of friends is to promote the formation of cliques and subgroups where expertise can be trapped and prevented from circulating to those outside the group, said Johnson. “You never know who in an organization has information. With Cubeless, everybody can see everything everyone else is doing,” he added.
Cubeless is built on a CRM platform that includes a relevance engine. “The relevance engine is looking at every member’s profile. It will determine the most likely people to benefit from information, so everyone doesn’t get spammed by e-mail,” said Johnson.
When questions asking for expertise are sent out, the right answer comes back within an hour 60 percent of the time, Johnson said. And for every question asked, there is an average of nine answers.
Curbing Tribal Warfare
The Bedside Trust, a health care industry consultancy, sought to give its clients social networking tools. “E-mail and IM are not enough,” said Jonathan Long, executive vice president of Bedside Trust. “You don’t develop a true dialogue. They may help you get a task done, but you need a social dialogue to solve problems. And hospital problems are very complicated.”
Hospitals, according to Long, are often beset by “tribal warfare” among physicians, nurses, administrators and even food service providers.
“Our mission is to transform these cultures,” Long said. “We needed new methods to get people communicating.”
To help in that effort, Bedside Trust makes a hosted version of the Socialcast social networking platform available to its clients. Socialcast’s simple user interface was important. “It’s like a Facebook for the enterprise. Some products get loaded down with features, and they get in the way. Simplicity is better,” said Long, who praised features that let users explore the network to find people with similar titles, see their faces, exchange e-mail and post questions.
“Physicians can share pharmaceutical information. It’s fantastic,” said Long. So far, Bedside Trust is still in the early stages of Socialcast deployment, with approximately 50 participants.
At IBM, 53,000 employees use a homegrown social networking tool called Beehive. An IBMer’s Beehive page typically contains his or her work history and pictures. “Formerly, you had to walk into someone’s office to get a sense of a person,” said Carol Sormilic, an IBM vice president. Beehive works hand in hand with IBM’s corporatewide employee directory called Blue Pages, which surfaced commercially in Lotus Connections.
IBM is tying Beehive and Blue Pages into additional Web 2.0 tools, including blogs, wikis and the company’s Twitter-like application, called BlueTwit, which has some 2,000 users so far. The company also encourages “crowdsourcing,” in which expertise on a given topic is solicited from the social network community.
Microsoft uses the social networking features it has added to SharePoint Server to help build cohesion within the company. One such feature is My Site. “It’s like a corporate Facebook. Employees are all profiled, and you can search across that profile, like yellow pages,” said Christian Finn, director of product management for SharePoint at Microsoft.
Finn agrees with Sabre’s Johnson that social networking in a company must be different from its consumer counterparts. “Deploying social networking in an enterprise is different than friending people on Facebook,” he said. “Inside of Microsoft, everybody has a My Site. The My Site network is a closed system. It does not integrate with consumer networks.”
Once they’ve found each other via My Site, Microsoft employees collaborate using blogs, wikis and podcasts, said Finn.
A Rich Toolbox
While some vendors’ social networks have been inspired by Facebook, WorkLight created software called WorkBook that requires Facebook. “We built an application that is an overlay on top of Facebook-it allows you to pull in your Facebook friends and collaborate with them behind the firewall,” said David Lavenda, vice president at WorkLight. WorkLight adds security by using a business’s existing user authentication scheme to authenticate WorkBook participants.
Just as IBM and Microsoft have added social networking tools to their collaboration software suites, wiki vendors such as Socialtext and Jive have gotten into the act by offering social networking tools with their core wiki products.
Similarly, Yammer, a tool that works much like Twitter but is intended for business use, includes a social networking component that gives employees personal pages
Return on investment is a slippery concept when it comes to social networking tools because it’s hard to come up with a reliable yardstick to measure the cost of the tool versus cost savings due to time saved as well as new opportunities created.
However, any social networking tool is only as good as the number of people using it, the quality of the information they post on their sites and the frequency with which they use the tool. While some companies mandate that all employees have a personal Web page, not all businesses are comfortable taking a stance that might be seen as coercive.
Despite questions, enterprises-especially those with highly skilled employees working in far-flung locations-are coming to the realization that new tools are needed to build a corporate culture in which knowledge is quickly located and shared. And a virtual water cooler is just the thing to bring that about.