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Schwartz c01.tex V3 - 12/26/2008 11:38am Page 17
Chapter 1: Social Computing
Some of the reasons preventing the private enterprise sector from adopting Social Net-
working might be based on a number of factors and challenges that are very different
from — and may not affect — the public sector users, including the governance of the
sites, information, and time. You don’t want to have people on the computer all day
trying to set up social networks and leaving messages on other people’s walls. This
would not be a good use of time.
Cost is one of the biggest factors I have seen for why a company might not bring in the
tools. This includes hardware and software costs. The investment can be very high for
enterprise-level tools, especially when the number of users starts to climb.
Integration seems to be a problem that has always been a challenge. Some recent chal-
lenges have been how to integrate the data from these products. Although it is much
easier in SharePoint 2007, this is still a concern for many companies.
There are always features that companies want that they cannot get from a product,
and that is where the community has to step up and create them. You need to have
a good community of people continually improving the product. The good news for
SharePoint users is that it does have great community involvement.
There are always a large number of companies looking to see who jumps first and
was successful doing so. As soon as there are a number of large companies that are
successful, I think there will be a wave of other companies following the trend.
Competition! Many companies don’t know what the best solution is yet, and they are
still evaluating what is out there. This can be a problem if your product is just like
any other product available. For instance, some people use LinkedIn, and some use
Facebook, but, when you have free access to both, you can use both. If you had to
invest a lot of money into each one, you may be forced to evaluate the cost benefit of
each and select only one of them to buy. What would you do if you had to pick just
one?
I am sure there are many other factors, but I think many customers are getting ready to
move, and they just need more time and/or resources, one of which being money. It is
difficult to change without the availability of these.
Social networking may be behind right now, but I don’t think it will be for very long. I
have been talking with some leading enterprise companies, and they are looking at the
tools. They are looking not only for productivity, but also as a requirement to attracting
good employees. Some of the best and brightest workers have come to expect a certain
level of tools at work that help them accomplish their tasks.
Used with permission from
http://blogs.sharepointguys.com/brendon/web-2-0
/enterprise-web-2-0/is-social-networking-behind-in-the-enterprise/
.
The Business Value of Social Computing
One of the most questioned parts of social computing is the value it provides to the business. Some IT
organizations as well as users still feel that the value returned with social computing applications is not
well-defined. Part of the reason is that many inexperienced IT managers and corporate executives think
that social computing is the same as social networking web sites like Facebook. Because of this, they feel
there is no value in creating a social network in a company for employees to waste time. They couldn’t be
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