Most people, including me, would completely agree with
Salesforce's CEO Marc Benioff and his statement around private cloud is a false
cloud. The concept of private cloud is really an oxymoron, unless the scope of
the private cloud is large enough, so that resource sharing and
economy-of-scale can kick in.
Similar to Cloud computing, the value and power of Social
networks is highly dependent on their size. Actually, as the Metcalfe’s law
states, it is even much more important for networks.
Social network is
fueled by the number of its active participants
When this emerging social energy is looking to also power
businesses, it hits the data security wall. And thus the realization is done
through so-called ‘private social networks’ that are providing access only to
people that work for the same company.
As an example, Salesforce Chatter as well as Jive, Yammer,
SocialCast, SocialText are providing a ‘private social network’ infrastructure
for company's employees. They can have limited success with very large
companies that manage to build a vibrant network.
To illustrate the fundamental problem of ‘private social
network’ let’s use the telephony systems.
Imagine that you could freely call anyone in your company,
but…guess what, for calling partners and customers you would need a completely
different system, devices and network. Same analogy can also be made to email
systems, and Internet usage as a whole. Would it be an acceptable solution?
The main reason for having ‘private social networks’ is data
security. It is also a major concern for telephony system, emails and Internet.
But they have all managed to overcome it without significantly compromising
over the openness of the network and thus its value and efficiency.
The main weaknesses
of private social networks
1. Restricted network size limits the potential value.
Very large companies can benefit from an improved internal communication, but
will find it hard to communicate with external partners and customers. For
smaller companies where external communication is playing a major part, private
social network is not economic.
2. Network building effort is done repeatedly.
Private networks are isolated, thus they need to start the enormous effort of
building a network from scratch again and again for every company.
3. External partners and customers are treated as guests. It keeps guests as second-level citizens of the network, missing a place to get access
to all of their activity. It is like having a different inbox/outbox and
message types for each company they deal with.
So private social network,
o Is not efficient
o Is not democratic
o Is not economical
o Is not environmental
Private social network can still be a good starting point
for large companies to experience social networking methods for communicating
and collaborating.
True 'business-oriented social networks' are coming up…
In the spirit of the 'social
power and the coming corporate revolution' by David Kirkpatrick, I went
back to the French revolution. True 'business-oriented social
networks' should strive for Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité...or in English,
support the freedom to associate and act with any member of the network, while
ensuring equal rights to all members. This is actually the foundation of all 'public social networks'.
Few business-oriented principles should be added to the open foundation:
o Business context
o Company notion
o Enterprise grade security and privacy - leverage proven concepts from the well-established networks e.g. Telephony and Internet.
In an interview
that Parker Harris Salesforce.com co-founder gave to R “Ray“ Wang recently, he
seems to also agree that collaboration and relationships should be ‘fluid
relationship’ as he called it, and I am quoting "All of the hand offs
today are coarse but in the future, this will feel like a fluid relationship.
It won't feel like you are shifting gears between companies."
So we can expect that one of the next versions of Salesforce
Chatter or different vendor will be a true social network…
Do you agree?
What's your opinion?
