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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.

(PARIS) Only one in five organizations have senior executives that think the intranet is mission-critical, according to Jane McConnell’s annual Global Intranet Trends Report. While this is embarrassingly low, and quite frankly shameful, this is up 5% from last year. Frankly, however, it’s far too little and most likely too late for far too many organizations.

At this rate a majority of corporations will treat their intranet with the importance it deserves sometime in the next decade. The remainder will follow in their footsteps sometime over the next millennia. I am wholely embarrassed for these executives who probably would rate their customer-facing website as mission-critical, but openly neglect and screw-over those employees whose job it is to serve those customers!

Some other disturbing trends:

• Only 20% of study participants ‘absolutely’ agree that the intranet’s primary purpose is to facilitate collaboration
• Only 22% absolutely agree that the intranet’s primary purpose is to facilitate productivity
• 60% absolutely agree that the intranet’s primary purpose is to distribute information
• “Help generate business opportunities” is not seen yet as an important purpose of the intranet

I guess the intranet is nothing more than a newsletter with a phone directory for most. It is sad, but true. Of course, this won’t change unless you (both intranet managers and consultants) learn to put on your sales hats and begin promoting the potential of the intranet by actively showcasing leading examples (many of which have been highlighted here on IntranetBlog.com (see the Intranet Case Studies) because these narrow-minded, old-school, windbag executives won’t learn any other way. So it is incumbent on you to ‘sell’ the intranet.

Nor surprisingly the top 3 “serious obstacles” according 40% of respondent organisations:

1. Intranet not seen as a priority
2. Lack of awareness of the potential role of the intranet
3. Lack of ownership at a senior level

My rant notwithstanding, and not to undermine the quality of this superlative report, Jane’s report is a very good read chalked full of excellent statistics and findings. Here are some more findings from Jane (see Highlights from the 2007 Global Intranet Survey Reports - just published) of the study of 178 company intranets (medium to large organizations with 5,000 to 100,000 employees:

• The intranet already is “the way of working” or will be in 1 or 2 years for over half the organisations in the survey population. Half say that today employees would be disturbed in their work if the intranet “went down” for 1 to 2 hours, with the figure reaching 3 out of 4 if it “went down” for 24 hours.
• 3 out of 5 organisations are “not really satisfied” or “not satisfied at all” with their intranet search.
• Well over half respondents have “less than one person” who works on supporting and optimising search. Very few have taxonomies, and not nearly enough do analysis on the search logs.
• Intranet 2.0 tools and technologies are being tested by a majority of organisations and visibly integrated into the intranet by many.
• Organisations where the intranet already is or will soon become “the way of working” are more involved in 2.0 than the others. 4 out of 5 compared to 3 out of 5 in the full survey population).   
• 1 out of 3 of these organisations have established an official 2.0 strategy. 

The Global Intranet Trends Report is a very worthwhile report and should be used as a frequent reference for building your intranet business case. You can purchase it for $525 – or even better, purchase the enhanced he Global Intranet Analysis Report at $1175.