Over the next few years social networking technologies are tipped to become as commonplace in large organisations as e-mail and the telephone. In the current economic climate, there is increasing focus on enabling employees to maximise their potential and generate results for the business – Enterprises introducing social technologies in the workplace are certainly not pandering to the demands of the technology-savvy employee.

Advocates of social networking point to these technologies as solving one of the biggest challenges faced by large organisations; namely, how do you make the knowledge and expertise that exists within an organisation available to everyone whenever they need it? It’s all about networking.

But how do you maintain those networks when potentially you don’t see people very often? How do you replicate that conversation around the water cooler when some people are perhaps thousands of miles away? The answer is social networks...they allow employees to fulfil that. They allow teams to stay in contact. They allow individuals to see what others are doing.

Improving information sharing

There’s certainly no shortage of tools available to enterprises to allow users to interact and share data with other users.

Enterprise 2.0 is already being deployed in large companies that understand the benefits of using internet-based technologies to improve productivity and efficiency. Harnessing and exploiting intellectual capital has long proved a challenge for enterprises, but the key difference in Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 technologies is that the knowledge sharing and collaboration it enables is driven by users. Blogs, Wikis, and tagging enable the enterprise to utilise knowledge that was always there but never previously captured.

Many companies use Web 2.0 technologies for sharing what is essentially unstructured data – used to improve collaboration, but some enterprises, including Shell, have started converting official documentation to wikis, because this enables that company to make documentation updates available in real time and allows non-editors to contribute to the process.

Paradoxically, this openness and sharing of information can also lead to improved security. That’s because all this information is accessed via a single portal. And as long as there is a secure connection, any device that runs a web browser can be used to access corporate information. If employees can access data wherever they are, then they don’t need to put it on a memory stick or print it out as it’s always available. So actually, security gets better. Far from being a liability, this becomes an asset. If you have the right access it means you’re not carrying information. For instance if an employees laptop merely runs a browser and is stolen they’ve just got a laptop – there’s no information on it.

Return on investment

Some argue that firstly, businesses need to be able to quantify the benefits of social networking and figure out the return on investment (ROI) but this can be tricky. This should not however be a reason alone to discount social networking since it would probably be just as difficult to articulate the tangible business benefits allied to more conventional office tools, such as e-mail and telephony.

The answer to the ROI conundrum, according to those we have spoken to, is to ‘suck it and see’. In other words, businesses should press ahead with social networking and figure out the benefits once it’s up and running.

And there’s another, critical factor to consider – the culture of the organisation. To harness social networking technologies in the Enterprise, the environment has to be right - a spirit of collaboration and openness must exist. Any move to force people to take part simply won’t work. Instead, people have to engage in the process. Their inclusion needs to be nurtured and encouraged. And they need a reason to take part. The key in here is allowing people to learn how good these tools can be - don’t impose them or mandate that people use them. Just put them out there and let people discover how good they can be. The information gets about virally - and that’s how the good news spreads.