Business goes social: Sharing within the corporate firewall

MANILA, Philippines - The Facebooking CEO and executives on Twitter, speaking their minds in 140 characters or less, sharing links and status updates seem anathema to the rigid structure of the business environment that puts prime emphasis on data and communications privacy.

However, social media is the new art of conversation and business is taking notice. There are, however, applications that incorporate the best features of social networking to communication and conversations within the corporate firewall.

One of these applications is IBM’s Lotus Connections, which has been launched in Manila.

“The lessons we learned from social networking are now applied to the business environment. The Philippines is a great adapter of social networking technologies and the message we have for the Philippine business community is that social networking for business application is available,” said John Mullins, IBM Business Unit Executive, Lotus Collaboration Software ASEAN, at the sidelines of the Lotusphere and Information On Demand Come to You event recently.

“We are not talking about the consumer world here, we are not talking about a tool to let your friends know what restaurants you had dinner last night. What we are talking about is sharing real business ideas,” he said.

Lotus Connections, he explained, is the leading social networking for business application in the world with now over 15 million users worldwide.

In an organization, he said, management wants everybody to engage with each other. We want people to share ideas freely, to be transparent so that they can find the experts and ideas and information within the company, and form work teams and communities. Anybody within the organization should be able to contribute to the organization.

However, the technologies that we are using today have made people slaves to their e-mail inboxes. There should be a way to share and communicate more effectively using the social networking style in a secure way.

With Lotus Connections, people in the organization can have their own profiles that show details of how they can be contacted, who their bosses are and who are the people they manage or working with.

“The key point to any business social network is the quality of the profile and combining corporate profile and user base information,” Mullins said. “Who are the people I do business with on a daily basis? I should be able to contact, collaborate or work with them easily.

Instead of a “wall,” Lotus Connections has a “board” where people can post status updates, share links, photos, videos, and documents.

In the past, work teams need to go to the IT department to ask them to create for them a team room or shared drives for collaboration. Mullins said this is no longer necessary as one can create work communities with the application in minutes. Among members of a team, they can share bookmarks, files, wikis, photos, and discussions in a secure way.

“We all know that when you post something to a consumer service or a social networking site in most cases you are giving up all ownership rights to that content,” Mullins said.

“Social networking is appropriate for our private lives but in a business context, a company should deploy applications that ensure data security,” he added.

Moreover, Mullins said the social business tool is accessible via mobile like iPad, Android devices, iPhone and other smartphones, and the BlackBerry Playbook.

“It looks like consumer tool, but it’s really a serious business tool,” he said.

As many large companies in the Philippines already run Lotus Notes and Domino, Mullins disclosed that the next release of this software will already incorporate social networking technologies. However, as early as now, there are already companies in the Philippines deploying Lotus Connections.

Social business is really growing in Southeast Asia, according to Claus Mortensen, principal at IDC’s Emerging Technology Advisory Services.

The fundamental transformation in business applications, he said, is leading to the emergence of the so-called “socialytic” apps or the fusion of social and collaboration software and analytics to the business workflow.

An IDC study showed that at least 68 percent of companies are integrating customer relationship management (CRM) suites’ social features in 12-months time, while 57 percent of companies said they prefer to integrate it with their current apps or via the cloud.