Social Silos: Companies Embrace In-House Networks

Gyms. Cafeterias. Lounges. You mean you have time for that stuff at the office?

Or more to the point, you still have an office?

Global business operates wherever it finds itself. Hopefully with wifi and an electrical connection. Going out to lunch? A game of squash? Hanging out at the water cooler? Who has time - and who can find anyone to join them?

So companies are attempting to bring what remains of office culture to where the people are. Which means the road, the home office, the client site. And the best way to do that is to create an in-house network that replicates - apes may be the better word - elements of the social networks that people are using anyway. The idea is to capture on a dedicated, secure (they hope) network some of the human interaction that used to get shared in person.

Aside from promoting what is left of old-school bonding, the strategy is to get people to share tips, leads, institutional knowledge and, let's be honest, gossip that may be helpful in generating business. There are plenty of third party providers eager to help. Will it work? Not yet clear. But the cost is relatively low, no training is required and given the already attenuated lifestyles most salarymen and women lead, a little electronically enabled human contact in an era of chronic right-sizing might actually improve performance. JL

Quentin Hardy reports in the New York Times:

The market for corporate social software must be getting big: the purveyors are following each others’ strategies, and talking each other down.

More than a gimmick, workplace social software is an increasingly necessary tool to hold together modern organizations, said Jive Software’s chief executive, Tony Zingale. “Organizations are more fractured, fragmented and mobile than ever. There has got to be a better way for them to be more connected,” he said. Jive Software, the largest and most successful of the companies trying to bring a little Facebook-style communication to the workplace, just released a 30-day free trial version of its product, along with a “Jive Anywhere” feature that will make it useable from anywhere on the Web.

In addition, Jive is releasing an analytics capability that could speed the sharing of knowledge and connections throughout an organization. These features come from Jive’s acquisition last year of Proximal Labs, a well-regarded maker of machine-learning and data-mining software.

All of these new features are designed to work in the cloud computing versions of Jive. Jive was originally released for older-style corporate servers, but is trying to move to the more flexible cloud architectures used by its main rivals, notably Yammer and Chatter, the latter a social enterprise product from Salesforce.com

“A company gym, a nice cafeteria, are ’80s concepts. C.E.O.’s recognize that the time for this has come.”

Indeed, corporate social software can potentially let people in remote locations stay on top of each others’ work, and even seek out expertise within the company on the fly. Certain aspects of the Jive strategy, in particular the free trial, look like efforts to compete with Yammer, which sells cloud-based social software in a “freemium” model.

In Yammer’s case, anyone can get the software, and start working with it. Over time, the hope is, the product will be so popular (and the information technology department will so want control again) that the company will pay for a premium version of the product, which offers centralized control.

Yammer’s chief executive, David O. Sacks, says that Jive is still not fundamentally a cloud company, and that will affect its ability to move swiftly. “They still have releases that are a nightmare, with salesmen selling one version, while its engineers work on another. We’re all cloud, a single version, so we release an upgraded version every Friday night.” That way, all subscribers just get their data with the new features.

Mr. Zingale said that selling multiple versions of Jive, some for the cloud, some for corporate servers, and some hosted by Jive but not shared in a cloud of computers, was just a matter of living with the reality of different corporate tastes. “Not everyone is willing to migrate to the cloud, or get something they can’t customize” to suit corporate needs, he said. “We’ve got to live with that.”

Likewise, limiting how long someone can use Try Jive, and how people can sign up (the second person in a corporation to use it has to seek permission from the first), may be ways to assure older companies that Jive affords more control.

The ultimate goal of all these companies is to make their communications system not so much a corporate feature, but the backbone of business, connected to databases in areas like finance, human resources, sales and product development. That would make them core, but it also requires a high level of trust.