Deloitte unveiled its technology, media and telecom predictions for 2009, and something that jumped out was how enterprise social networks (aka Facebook for the Fortune 500) are going to see more traction.
It’s an interesting proposition given how enthusiastically people have embraced social networks such as Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, et al. The question is whether social networks have a place within the enterprise and whether they will have anywhere near the same kind of impact.
Deloitte is clearly bullish on the idea, suggesting that:
“Enterprises and governments are looking for cost-effective ways to distribute information throughout their networks. In 2009, this is likely to include more spending on internal social networks and the tools required to build and enable them. With the world’s highest penetration of consumer Facebook users, Canada is poised to be a global leader in transitioning this technology to the enterprise. Although social networks don’t cost much to deploy, the challenge is likely to be in measuring their return on investment.”
My take is Deloitte is being overly-optimistic. When it comes to adopting the “social” elements of the Web, the vast majority of companies are cautious and, frankly, scared to make a mistake. It has taken them years, for example, to climb on the blog bandwagon even though it’s a natural communications, marketing and sales tools.
So the idea that companies are going to enthusiastically embrace social networks is difficult to swallow.
This isn’t to suggest social networks don’t have a place within companies as valuable tools to collaborate, share information and network. But I think it requires a huge leap of faith for a CTO or CIO to implement social networks when other parts of the organization are conservatively approaching “low-hanging fruit” such as blogs.
Technorati Tags: facebook, deloitte, social networks
4 Comments
I have to agree with you. Corporations – even high tech firms – are a long way from adopting social network tools. There’s a lot of mistrust and the technology is not well understood. But it is growing.
With regard to cost, there actually is a significant cost to deploy social network tools. Corporate IT likes to control things so that typically means they want to study it and secure it. Given that the benefits are relatively intangible, it’s hard to get the justification to go ahead. Then there’s training and support. But it will come.
It think the big push will come from the new younger workforce, especially when they start to take over managerial roles, and teleworkers who need better collaboration and networking tools that office workers.
Might be time to define just what exactly Traction is..
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Strong value props can be written for corporate social networking tools especially for enterprises with those with globally dispersed workforces.
These Canadian companies have great enterprise social networking solutions!
cfactor – Saskatoon
Ramius – Ottawa
Igloo – Waterloo
BrainPark – Guelph
Open Text – Waterloo
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[...] Can Enterprise Social Networks Gain Traction? My point being, perhaps we really need to define or look at what traction is. [...]