Time to unlearn some lifetime habits
Jinfo Blog

2nd November 2009

By Tim Buckley Owen

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Social networking activity may be costing companies precious staff time at the moment, but the era of real applications that they can’t afford to ignore is approaching fast. Astute information professionals can capitalise on this – but only if they abandon their traditional focus on documents and files. Employees’ use of Twitter and other social networks is costing UK businesses £1.38 billion a year in lost productivity, according to IT services and technology company Morse PLC. It’s also laying them open to security risks and potential staff damage to their brand reputation – but many businesses still have ‘some way to go’ when it comes to developing usage policies (http://digbig.com/5banyd). Companies’ brand reputation could also be under siege from another front, if research from US strategy & communications agency Cone Inc is to be believed; its 2009 Cone Consumer New Media Study finds that almost 80% of new media users interact with companies or brands, compared with just under 60% in 2008. Not only that, almost half of them are concerned about corporate responsibility – and nearly three quarters are expecting companies to join in such conversations (http://digbig.com/5banye). Developments like this represent a great opportunity for software developers; NewsGator already offers advanced social computing capabilities for Microsoft SharePoint 2007, and its recently unveiled Social Sites 3.0 for the upcoming SharePoint 2010 adds yet further features. ‘Times have changed, and businesses are realising they need to support the way people actually prefer to interact,’ says NewsGator's vice president of products Brian Kellner (http://digbig.com/5banyg). Interaction with outsiders, as opposed to people within the enterprise, is likely to extend way beyond simple comment before too long, suggests the IT research company Gartner. It predicts that, by 2014, citizen developers – users operating outside the scope of enterprise IT and its governance – will be building at least 25% of new business applications for consumption by others (http://digbig.com/5banyh). Social networking’s all-pervasive influence on business looks like good news for information managers – whether they’re policing staff use, monitoring for reputational risk or managing systems. But in order to profit from all these developments, they may have to unlearn some lifetime habits. As wiki-like collaboration techniques mature and gain more acceptance, collaboration around files and documents – the information professional’s stock in trade – is likely to fall away, predicts another Gartner report, Wikis and Documents Represent Different Ways of Working. Understanding and accommodating that change is going to represent a major challenge (http://digbig.com/5banyj). Both traditional Microsoft Office document based users and those accustomed to free flowing, collaboratively edited wikis and blogs, can stumble when confronted with the alternative practice, Gartner warns. To seize the opportunities on offer, information professionals will need to be able to work with both.

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