something for the enterprise," he says.
Banking on Facebook
While IBM has created its own tools, Standard Chartered Bank is piloting the use of Facebook for internal use. The London-based bank has over 75,000 staff in 76 countries and with many functional units spread across multiple locations, Standard Chartered needed a way to connect people within the organization. But why choose Facebook?
"Why should we build a better wheel, if someone has already invented it?" says John Meakin, group head of information security at Standard Chartered.
"So long as one can overcome the security issues, and be convinced of reliability of the service, then why reinvent it just so that you can say you own it?"
Meakin has been piloting the WorkLight WorkBook, a Facebook application which saves the company's data to their own servers, since the beginning of the year. The pilot has focused initially on a worldwide community of developers who are collaborating and exchanging information.
"Some of them are working in very similar areas, and we are trying to encourage inter-working across the project teams," says Meakin. "We are also targeting senior management groups, another archetypal business group which is spread across various locations."
He is optimistic, yet also pragmatic, about their experiment. The bank wants to improve productivity and communications, but Meakin admits that "if the building of communities doesn't deliver any tangible business benefits then we will limit our investment."
He adds: "We've seen lots of enthusiasm for all sorts of different potential uses, which we're trying to foster, but we are not sufficiently naive to believe that this will run itself and that all uses will be beneficial. We obviously need to monitor carefully the degree of business use and if we don't think that it gives real business benefits, we will rein in the extent to which we invest in the platform."
It's too early to tell whether Standard Chartered's use of Facebook is a success, or to even start discussing individual use cases, but what's clear is that the organization has a sensible attitude towards the tool, has been careful about data security, and is open-minded about how the experiment may turn out.
But when companies do use tools that are usually associated with personal social interactions for business interactions, the lines between personal and professional can become uncomfortably blurred. Often this is because personal use has bled over into the workplace in an ad hoc manner, without consideration of the business use case and without providing users with good-practice guidelines.
One woman, who preferred to remain anonymous, talked about her experience in a large media company.
"When I started to use Facebook it was because of work pressure," she said. "Everybody in the office was using it, and it became difficult not to be there, because everybody was swapping photos, arranging work nights out, and even swapping shifts on Facebook. I held out for as long as I could, but eventually I signed up." At that point, she didn't understand how Facebook worked and didn't realize that as soon as she put her work email address in, it would sign her up to her company network.
"The minute I did that, I got lots of people requesting me as a friend," she said, "Several members of management, six or seven layers above my head, requested me as a friend. I would never have requested them, but you can't say no because if you reject them they can tell, and so you end up being stuck with these people.
"One of the worst moments was when my boss messaged me at 11 o'clock on a Friday night and said, 'Why are you still online? Aren't you working tomorrow?' I was sitting at home with a glass of wine in my hand and I thought, 'That's too weird'."
This uncomfortable invasion of privacy can become disturbing. She tells of how one senior member of management 'friended' her in order to try and dig up personal
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