Adventures in home working

This looks like an excellent group for people like me, working within a large enterprise, providing advice and solutions to large enterprises and trying to manage the disruptive enterprise 2.0, web 2.0 disruptive wave of change – while keeping our business and their’s running and profitable.

The mandate of the group:

The goal is to have a private forum for people inside companies to join virtual forces in driving Enterprise 2.0 into the mainstream. What makes this group different is that we will work to bring in experts to answer key topics and foster conversation. It is not a passive community.

A few days ago I wrote about how I saw social networking sites like Facebook complementing enterprise social sites used internally.  This is a nice complement to my view.  Serena software has introduced the idea of Facebook Fridays:

Each Friday, employees are granted one hour of personal time to spend on their Facebook profiles and connect with co-workers, customers, family and friends. This initiative will start today and will be rolled out in 18 countries where the company has offices.

Well since this post it appears that Serena is actually going a lot further than I had envisioned:

Serena wanted to promote a greater connection between people. Facebook, which is both free and a great example of web 2.0, seemed to be the right answer. They established a private Facebook group for Serena employees and they built a few simple custom Facebook apps to better enable intranet functions. Now they provide links through Facebook to documents stored securely behind the firewall. Access is just as secure as any other method. Serena employees go to specific people to get relevant information. For example, René and his staff provide press clippings and the HR people provide links to benefits information. In each case you learn about the people providing the information through their Facebook profiles, and not simply the content, itself.

Serena also has public Facebook groups to connect with customers and the broader marketplace. René said that some of his customer conversations have now moved away from email. Clients such as Stewart Cohen at Arbitron and Rajiv Amar at Intuit connect with René and his colleagues through Facebook. René is also one of my Facebook friends and I have noticed that he is usually at the top of the recently updated profile list so I can easily see what he is currently doing.

Serena has found that Facebook has also helped them with recruiting. People send their resumes through Facebook and prospective employees relate their use of the same networking tool that they use in their personal lives. Employee morale has also increased, as well as employee retention, as the whole firm is better connected. A few years ago, many people thought that blogs and business did not go together. We have seen that perception change dramatically. I wonder if the same will be soon said for Facebook and other social networking tools. Thanks to Serena for proving us with an example.

I’m still not sure that this is a great solution,  but it’s good to see companies pushing the boundaries.  The For Immediate Release Podcast did an interview with Jeremy Burton – CEO of Serena and you can Download the 24-minute conversation here

Having read Tom’s article where’s the working in social networking and Charlene Li’s counterpoint on the business value of social networking I’m still a bit torn.

I think my conclusion is that whilst I definitely see the value in inter-enterprise social networking,  I don’t see the technologies that provide it as an enterprise solution, I see them as a personal complement to an enterprise solution. 

For me an enterprise social networking solution can tap into so much extra information, that Facebook will never see,  that will enhance the networking experience, including:

1. Formal and harvested expertise information
2. HR information
3. Contact information
4. Formal hierarchy information
5. Business applications
6. Presence and real-time collaboration services
7. Personal and enterprise knowledge
8. Enterprise Search
9. etc

That’s not to say that inter-enterprise social networking solutions like Facebook and LinkedIn don’t have a role – they do – but just as my social network is personal, so is my Social networking technology provider.  That said I can certainly see that some content from my enterprise environment might be delivered on my Facebook page (just like Twitter updates are today) and vice-versa.

I can also definitely see some new social networking scenarios being very important to business, like this one that Charlene mentions:

Here’s an example – LinkedIn described to me a new social application that would show events in your industry that are coming up – and who in your network is going to them. It will also show you people in that city that you could connect with. So if you know that colleagues, suppliers, partners, funders, customers, etc. are going to be gathering, you’re going to want to be there too.