Rob’s Digital Life

As JP continues his Facebook in there Enterprise, he’s on part 8 now, I thought I’d do a small test of how useful Facebook can be within an Enterprise. The problem I had was that I was trying to find who looked after web hosting within Orange. My contacts within the sourcing team didn’t know and having only been with Orange for two months, my own contacts, which are slowly growing, didn’t know either.

So I turned to Facebook and the Orange network on it. I wrote a simple message on the Orange network page asking if anyone knew who ran web hosting. Within a few days I got two responses letting me know of people within Orange that were involved in hosting.

I didn’t test any of the more advanced features or need to know who was interested in what. The test showed that a Facebook style application could provide benefit to an organisation as a way of contacting a wider group of people with the similar interest, a really simple test.

There aren’t any tools like this in the enterprise right now, using email would have meant email bombing every employee, forums are pretty niche in their subjects, and even blogging still hasn’t become ‘mainstream’ within the Enterprise. I wonder how long it takes Facebook to license the software for Enterprises smart enough to realize the benefit’s of Facebook within a distributed knowledge management environment.