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Accenture executive last month even went so far as to categorically state that the entire realm of Web 2.0 (let alone Facebook) offers “no financial reward”.  

“There is no evidence that online networking sites are producing anything of real economic value,” said Theresa Wise, global director at Accenture’s digital media practice at a Broadband World Forum session in Paris entitled “The Emergence of Convergent Media” (as quoted by Ken Wieldand in BBWF: Accenture sees little financial value in Web 2.0 for Telecommnications Online).

While Intranet 2.0 is gaining traction, most organizations fear Facebook – even loathe Facebook. About half of the medium to large-sized organizations (it’s even higher in Government and Financial Services) forbid and block employees from using it. Notwithstanding the obvious executive concerns about employee productivity (“wasting good company time playing around on the Internet!”) a recent Forrester Research study found that 78 percent of IT organizations are concerned with the employee-driven, unsanctioned use of Web 2.0 technologies in the enterprises.   

IT’s biggest concern with Facebook, however, is its threat to corporate security. Some Facebook applications could in fact grab and expose confidential corporate information (see Speaking of Facebook as an underground intranet…).

WorkBook, a new product from WorkLight (a Web 2.0 start-up based jointly in Boston and Israel), combines “all the capabilities of Facebook with all the controls of a corporate environment, including integration with existing enterprise security services…” 

In other words, WorkBook allows employees to use Facebook while the company can protect its confidential data. For example, employees can monitor other employee activities such as postings and status update, and “publish and receive company-related news and create bookmarks to enterprise application data and securely share these bookmarks with authorized colleagues.”

Specifically, Workbook provides employers with:

• Secure provisioning that ensures the application can be used only by authorized employees
• Information security - corporate-related information is visible only to employees
• Compliance with existing security policies - enterprise security integration authenticates WorkBook users via corporate authentication facilities and supports Single Sign-On (SSO)
• Integration with the company's directory or applications to provide information to Facebook profiles 

"Enterprise employees are using Facebook in today's workplace whether employers like it or not," said Shahar Kaminitz, CEO and founder of WorkLight.  "This creates a tantalizing array of new networking possibilities for companies looking for newer and more efficient avenues of employee communication, but also brings with it a host of new security issues, as corporate data is exposed to new vulnerabilities.

“With WorkBook, enterprises can rest assured that when workers use Facebook, the corporate data remains safe and secure, and the application is being used as a communication tool - not as an impediment to productivity."   

Sounds great doesn’t it? Well…

WorkBook is currently in limited release, and is licensed to enterprises by yearly subscription. Pricing starts at $10 per user per month, with volume discount pricing available. For those counting at home, that’s an annual cost of $6 million for an organization or 50,000 (without factoring in a volume discount). That’s $6 million per year (excluding volume discount) to secure Facebook.

What’s the ROI on that? My point is that while Facebook shouldn’t be discounted as the potential benefits are many, but the business case is still unclear and certainly more fuzzy than more widely accepted enterprise 2.0 tools such as instant messaging.

Post you comments and/or business case arguments for and against corporate Facebook below.