Social Disconnection

I'm undecided on whether an organization can achieve much by attempting leverage social-like technology in a closed environment. On one hand, I can understand the rationale behind the desire to have an "internal" social network, but I have yet to see a single instance in which this was successful or seemed remotely useful.

The idea of a limited network of people is a compromise between the desire to leverage the capabilities of communication and information-sharing tools that social media provides while still defending the privacy of information: a firm may want its research staff to use blogs to raise internal awareness of their work and discoveries, but not to make the same information available to competitors.

This seems reasonable enough - but it's highly unusual that such programs garner much participation or generate productive results. They languish, and few people use them.

The poor functionality of solutions are at least part of the problem. A company that adopts a personnel directory for employees that has functionality that is "like" Facebook or LinkedIn often offers an inferior version of a service with which employees are already familiar. Their user experience with the public version gives them an level of expectation for what they should be able to do, but cannot, with the crippled internal version, and this discourage adoption and use.

Another part of the problem is the reach of the solution. Arguably, this is a much larger problem because, even in comparing fully public tools, the value of their features is less of an issue than the activity of the people who are already using the network. That is, even if a social site launched today whose features were far better than Facebook, it would not have half a billion active users, and would be an empty playground.

Granted, the head-count of an internal tool will always be less than that of external ones: if a company of 5,000 employees gains a 100% adoption rate for its internal social tools, the size of the audience is still much smaller than that of public sites, whose participants number in the hundreds of millions. But on the other hand, it does offer a very specific, targeted audience - like a niche social community that has a smaller number of users with expertise in a certain area of interest - and there are many such communities with a few hundred users, or even a few dozen, that are thriving.

Corporate culture is likely the primary cause: companies are secretive about any information, not just the information that is actually sensitive, and those in positions of power maintain authority by limiting the flow of information within the organization - by controlling information, a person becomes a gatekeeper who must be reckoned with by anyone who has need of that information. The boss who doesn't want anyone talking to "his people" without his consent or participation is still a common character in the corporate world.

Beyond the desire to control the flow of information is another cultural factor: the desire to control the information itself. Most organizations are dogmatic - those in positions of authority expect their ideas and opinion to be accepted rather than questioned by their subordinates. To allow an open discussion is to relinquish that control.

Naturally, there can be some debate over whether organizations actually are domineering or whether this is just a matter of perception. But ultimately, the results are the same: if the people in an organization fear reprisal for any remark they make, even if these fears are irrational, they tend to keep their teeth together. This is a matter of trust that is extremely difficult to resolve.

There are likely other reasons that the attempts to use internal tools, similar to social media, have largely been a failure - and it seems highly doubtful that they can be addressed to derive a solution that will be at all successful.