Looking out for a professional Facebook

In his latest blog post, Christian Kreutz asked why IT departments (who are still responsible for technical Knowledge Management solutions) seem to not take the participative web as a top priority. I fully agree with his analysis and also his call for a higher priorization of Web 2.0 within organizations.

Just to give one example: In fact, what I’m really looking for, is an internal Facebook application for enterprises/organizations, where everyone updates his status message regularly and you can see who’s currently working on what, meeting with whom, participating in which event, etc. Just imagine, somebody setting his status to "John Smith is drafting a discussion paper on xy". It would be so easy then to step in and say “hey, you’re working on this? That’s interesting for me too, I'm working on something similar! Let's have a look at it, maybe we do this together?”

After all, lots of our younger staff members and interns (most if them are below 30 years) spend huge amounts of time in their private Facebook accounts. They are naturally used to communicate and socialize like this. Why not seize this culture and skill setting for enhancing the communication flow withing professional teams and organizations?

By the way: It seems worth mentioning that Microsoft today bought a 1.6% stake in Facebook (worth 240 million USD). Now I'm myself not yet sure if that's good or bad news, but it might indeed be a step that could help integrating Web 2.0 as part of professional environments in the long run.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Thanks for writing this.

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