‘Facebook at Work’? There’s Certainly Some Work to Be Done

Jon Snyder/Wired.com

This year, Facebook celebrated its 10th birthday and in a blog back in February I discussed the huge impact that the social networking site had made on enterprise technology. Now, according to reports, Facebook is planning its own foray into the enterprise and has a team of engineers busily working away on its workplace-friendly site “Facebook at Work”. The product will apparently allow you to chat with your colleagues, collaborate on documents and connect with professional contacts.

While Facebook has had a positive impact on enterprise technology as a whole, driving it to become more user-friendly and bring together content, conversations and people, is the workplace ready for “Facebook at Work”? I’d certainly say “no” and there are a number of reasons why.

Firstly, while Facebook is clearly a productivity killer for the 23 per cent of people surveyed by Salary.com, the social networking site has been banned by banking, government, and other organizations worldwide for exactly this reason. Facebook first and foremost a personal tool used to chat and share photos and videos with your network of friends and families. The last thing employers want is their workforce spending office hours catching up with their long lost friends and how would organization’s monitor whether staff were using their personal or professional profile when at work?

Secondly, even with a compelling professional offering, linking colleagues, documents and relevant discussions, Facebook would then have to convince IT departments globally that its security measures met their stringent requirements. The way in which Facebook stores, shares and handles consumer data has been thrown into the limelight on numerous occasions. Incidents such as its mood manipulation study, as well as ongoing conversations around how it uses customer data for advertising, are unlikely to win over the hearts and minds of enterprises.

Lastly, there are already a number of services in the market that enable teams across and within organizations to work together on content and have relevant business discussions focused on files. Such services have been built with enterprise and government organizations in mind, adhere to strict security requirements and focus all conversations on the task in hand – working on documents and projects together. These services integrate into current enterprise ICT strategies, systems and workflows, rather than facing the challenge of being unblocked by IT.

Yes, Facebook may have gained the love of consumers globally and dragged enterprise technology out of the dark ages, but gaining the trust of enterprises and government organizations worldwide is its biggest hurdle. And it’s certainly something that won’t be achieved overnight.

Alastair Mitchell is co-founder and CEO of Huddle.com.