Social Networking at Work

According to the ReadWrite Enterprise, social networks are changing how manufacturers view their operations and manufacturers are becoming the "surprise adopters" of social computing. For example, wikis for recording best practices and capturing knowledge of departing engineers are big with these companies. (Facebook In the Factory: Manufacturers Want Social Software Too, via Ethan Yarbrough)

Why social? Because business is a social system for creating value. (This is one of the key principles of my Foundations of Business lecture series.) Collaboration is a social activity.

Some people think that "social" means spare-time activity. Thus in the work environment, "social" is what you do when you aren't actually performing your primary task. However, the word "socialize" doesn't just mean making friends with your colleagues, or time-wasting at work, but getting your colleagues to make friends with your ideas. Among other things, that means telling interesting stories (and not just dry bullet points and irrelevant clipart) - informal as well as formal communications. Good social activity also promotes trust. There are fewer and fewer jobs that don't require this kind of activity.

It's difficult to see how anyone could survive as a manager without understanding this, although some advocates of social networking and social computing feel the need to spell out the benefits of "social". See for example, Ethan Yarbrough's post In Defense of Social: Enterprise 2.0 Social Technologies Are Critical, Not Casual. But just because a manager understands the benefits of social doesn't mean she is going to encourage all her staff to spend a proportion of their working time on Facebook. One possible objection to Facebook is not that it is social, but that it isn't social enough. (Similar arguments have been put against the use of Facebook by teenagers, although some of these arguments involve some extremely dodgy science as documented by Dr Ben Goldacre, Bad Science Feb 2009.) There is an important question about the contribution of so-called social networking tools to the sociality (if that is the right word) of the organization, but this question would surely have to be investigated by sociologists, rather than by technologists or neuroscientists.

If we don't want to get sidetracked into sociology, perhaps we should sidestep the "social" label. In his post What do we call social media tools, Ethan suggests that we could call them "knowledge media" tools instead. But I am not sure this helps. I'd prefer to call them collaboration tools.

Meanwhile, there are people looking at how social media could transform public services, including the NHS. In November 2009, a UK group called Patient Opinion organized a conference on myPublicServices. See BBC News, 27 November 2009. Patient Opinion captures stories about what happens to people when they get medical treatment, and routes their criticism or praise to people in a local health authority who need to know and can, if need be, use that information to improve services.

Some people might regard the story-telling as an intrinsic part of the service. However, I guess most people would regard the story-telling as part of a collaborative effort to improve the services, which transcends the boundaries of those organizations traditionally tasked with managing these services. So there is still a way to go to integrate social media into the services themselves.

Microsoft becoming boring?

Microsoft is quietly turning itself into a utility company. The vision being presented by many computer industry leaders, including Bill Gates of Microsoft, is of computing services being piped into businesses and homes like electricity, delivered across some kind of grid, and billed according to usage. Utility computing is not just a technological move, but represents a business departure for Microsoft, leading it away from its high-tech alliance with Intel.

Many years ago, Gordon Moore of Intel declared that computer hardware power would double every eighteen months. The hardware industry continues to track this principle – known as Moore’s Law – fairly closely. Meanwhile, the software industry has benefited hugely from Moore’s Law and the exponential growth of computer hardware power. A constant supply of bigger and faster machines has meant a continual demand for new software licences. Meanwhile the software industry has returned the favour by producing feature-laden power-hungry software that helps stimulate the demand for bigger and faster machines.

Moore’s Law appears to offer a vision of ever-cheaper computing – but this is a mirage. Since total production costs, including R&D, are constantly increasing, unit costs can only fall if the total production volumes grow to achieve ever-larger economies of scale. Without rapid growth in IT spending, Moore’s law is not economically viable. Influential computer users, such as Eric Schmidt of Google, are turning their back on Moore’s Law, and using older, cheaper technology. Corporate IT budgets are being squeezed, and purchase of hardware and software is much harder to cost-justify. A dedicated minority of users may want the latest products with the most advanced features, but most users will be focused on more basic aspects of software value, such as reliability and total cost of ownership.

In January 2002 Bill Gates responded to this challenge by declaring a goal of Trustworthy Computing, both for Microsoft and across the industry. Against a background of poor software security, with Microsoft’s own organization frequently falling victim to Internet attack (most recently the Slammer virus), Microsoft promised to improve the reliability and security of its products. Instead of pushing out new features at all costs, Microsoft would devote more effort to testing, and to weeding out vulnerabilities. Some industry observers have seen this initiative as purely a technical one, and have noted Microsoft’s struggle to adopt this consistently across its organization. Others have dismissed it as marketing spin.

But the strategic potential of trustworthy computing goes much further than technical quality. Utility computing requires Microsoft to adopt a different culture, perhaps more grown-up and responsible, less technically exciting. It is a bold strategic move, with no certainty of outcome. Microsoft could simply have chosen to sit through the current downturn in IT spending, waiting for previous spending patterns to be resumed, knowing it would survive where many of its competitors wouldn’t. But if the move is successful, Microsoft becomes a value stock, producing a fat dividend yield from a secure industry position. Safe computing. 

 

Update

In 2010, danah boyd (then and now with Microsoft) wrote a post called Facebook is a utility, utilities get regulated (15 May 2010) HT @j2bryson