In recent discussions with clients at four different Gartner events, I've discussed the business value of creating an internal "MySpace" in which employees can share personal interests, hobbies, pictures of pets and children, and almost anything else they'd like to share (providing, of course, that they retain a sense of decorum). This really is nothing new. It's the notion of a personal "home page" on the intranet, but the emergence of MySpace.com has made IT organizations far more open to providing such a facility for their users.

Two pieces of advice: Make this an "opt in" activity (so that people who don't want to share personal details don't have to), and make sure it is searchable, so people can find others with similar interests.

Have you experimented with creating an internal sharing site? How are people using it? What business benefits are you seeing?

Let me know.

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This is an example of the convergence of consumer and business technology. It is certainly possible to create an internal "MySpace," but why should employees have to create and maintain separate "MySpaces"? Wouldn’t it be nice if an organization provided tools for those who want to create internal personal pages, but also allows the linkage to external personal pages, blogs, etc.? There are many people coming into the workforce who already have created their own personal pages. Why reinvent the wheel?

Well, my curmudgeonly take is that who cares about the personal stuff—I don’t really want to see it. BUT, I do think there is a tremendous value in MySpace for business which presents different nuances of a user’s professional life—what you do all day, interesting observations/musings, a CV, publications, professional links and a chat board, etc.

I would suggest a third piece of advice: make sure that policy and guidelines for appropriateness of content on internal MySpaces is communicated and understood. Just like MySpace has an AUP, so should an internal MySpace.

In many orgs, there is a strict policy around appropriate use – in a firm I used to work at, people used email communities (aka dist lists) for their personal interests. So, occasionally a group would appear who had developed a community with like sexual interests or gambling or church or whatever. This can be a liability for companies who allow this because when someone who disagrees with the lifestyle or whatever of those other people, they can complain or even sue the company for allowing this kind of activity. In fact, the email team had to continually scan for inappropriate activities and purge the dist lists, etc.

So, do you really believe we ought to get into this territory and advise clients on what is and is not appropriate use of corporate resources? You would be amazed (no, you probably wouldn’t) at what some people want to talk about and what others think is discriminatory or inflammatory or distasteful or unethical – and both expect their company to protect their “rights” in these spaces.

My two cents – and maybe people are more accepting of differences than they were ten years ago, but I’m skeptical.

It's useful to be able to add stuff easily - RSS feeds/REST-driven components, etc. - via the widget model. I add widgets to my blog. (No one cares, but I do.)

Why bother with this at all? This sounds like your father trying to be trendy by pretending to like rap music. People who really care about connecting to others with similar interests will already be doing so over the Internet, because that’s where all the nerds gather. They won’t want to waste time with a restricted, cut-down version of what they can do in cyberspace already. I don’t use MySpace or have a personal web page, but am already connected to a number of rather focused special interest groups through mailing lists and Yahoo groups. If any of the people that shared these interests worked for my company I would probably know about it already!

Here’s the real question. Rather than “pretending” to care about this personal interaction through a controlled corporate intranet, how many companies out there allow their users to access MySpace from their work Internet connection?

You are so right, Nigel.

Hi!

A year and a half back I did experiment as part my marketing role. Being one of the larger companies, found there was lot talent and that many of the employees who had chidren wanted to create "show case" area for their talents.

We strated two intitiatives - one to show case such artisitic talents inside the company on the intranet and part of which was also showcased on the to the outside world on the company website.

The second was targeted at employees who had children and created a separate website to showcase the talents of kids.

Both were great hits and was welomed by many.

I would say creating such spaces inside the organisation is a great idea.
S. Ranganathan

As a Gartner client, I would welcome guidance on crafting AUP's and trends on truly Open Communication in the enterprise. We're implementing blogs and have implemented a wiki. TO my dismay, our wiki is already locked down and one has to request persmission to edit sites. This defeat the very essence of the wiki.

Personally, I see the benefit in open communication (with an AUP and some oversight) being one of creating a learning organization. I'd be very interested to see where other enterprises are going in this space and likewise, what avant garde companies like Microsoft and Google are doing in this arena.

I must concur with Kathy and Nigel. Previous experience at the top of a corporate IT organization taught me to be very cautious of incorporating a technology concept that is tightly coupled with behavioral patterns. Myspace is just such a concept.

If blogs, wikis and now the 'Myspace' style of collaboration is promoted strictly for professional use in the workplace, there is potential for intrinsic value. Management must be careful of 'info-creep'. That's where potential AUPs should come into play.

In a few years' time, many IT executives currently advocating this idea may very well discover that 'info-creep' has occurred and the potential libabilities will finally be exposed.

The key concern has to do with technology that is designed for one application going out-of-control when one attempts to apply it in a different context. We've seen this sort of thing happen before, and will surely see it again.

Tom's post refers to the "business value" of such sites. As a KM type, I immediately took that to mean the business value of connecting employees that wouldn't otherwise get connected, allowing them to share tacit knowledge that wouldn't otherwise be shared, etc. Seems like most of the commenters have either missed this or rejected it as a worthwhile endeavor.

Two thoughts:

1) If the datafields for such a site are set up intelligently, they would include just the right mix of personal and professional information that allows a viewer to determine if they need to / want to contact this person. Of course, for this to work, employees actually need to create them, and including personal information (as an option) would logically make it more likely that employees will create one in the first place.

2) I disagree with the assumption in the comments that the average member of the key demographic already has a MySpace (or similar) site. Maybe in the tech industry, and obivously in the twenty-something age range. But not everyone else, and most significantly, not the prime subject matter experts in most companies ... the folks that are nearing retirement and about to walk out the door with all that business-operations-critical tacit knowledge in their head unless other employees get to it first ...

So here's my Gartner-client question: Anyone know of any open source (or cheap) software that would be ideal for this use on an enterprise intranet?

Hi
I'm currently leading an effort to develop an internal social networking site. Our hope is to allow folks to find others based on alumni, expertise, skills, projects, and some personal interest. The larger an organization the harder it is to find the right information, person, etc.

We are scheduled to launch our site this fall. With no real metrics associated with this I'm going on the hunch of the MySpace phenom' to measure our success.

I would be interested if other larger organizations are pursuing similar strategies.

I held a workshop on internal blogging at our PCC conference in London which generated a lot of best practices. One of the most common was that what you are talking about here is good. They wanted people to blog about their gardens, their holidays, why they do their jobs, etc., so that people can get go know each other, and are more likely to cooperate or work together. This was a unanimous sentiment from the users who have been doing it.

In response to J.D. Whitlock's question, although not open source (or cheap), but widely implemented in the DoD community is SharePoint portal server with its inherent "My Page" out of the box. Another open source option that I use is Joomla with the Community Builder component.

An internal 'MySpace' raises a couple of issues:
- The internal 'MySpace' could stimulate bonding (meaning: bringing peers together) and bridging (meaning: bringing people above and below one in the organizational hierarchy together) and thus create a stronger feeling of belonging and identity - an effect I would say is largely positive for any organization.
- However, in addition to breaking down hierarchies, the internal 'MySpace', encourages the breakdown of boundaries between one's personal and professional life. While common and generally accepted in places like North America and Japan, it is not so common - nor welcome - in most European work cultures.
- Introducing an internal 'MySpace' could have the effect of familiarizing the organization with new technology (web 2.0, rich media etc.), where the private element of the project would serve to motivate people to learn more than traditional top-down scheduled training. It doesn't require a genius to see that this familiarization could have positive effects on other aspects of the business like innovation, business process change, BI, marketing etc.

It would be interesting to get more feedback from companies implementing social networking technology internally.

Hi! Tom,

What you had figured about a personal "home page" is really an note worthy thinking and its benefits to business is enormous. BUT, I would like to share something with you all here. Please think of the same and give your views.

If even a small personal home page can help an organization to maximize its employees potential, which has direct positive effect on a business unit. Then, why not think about getting the whole organization into a collaborative and cognitive eBusiness platform.

Till now, we have developed/mastered softwares/applications from the personal/team stand point.(thats the only reason why we have 10s of standalone applications to work from every day) BUT, from the organization point of view, we have none. Has, organizations are still working on an effective level rather than being efficient.(still 80% of an organizational data are unstructure)

I would rather support a eWorking Facility in this knowledge age to move ahead form hereon as the individual is of any organization is the key to knowledge and we need to capture, index and structure them in the right place.

Rgds,
Sushant Madhab
http://www.qxsystems.com
http://www.workace.com

I think that having a personal "My Space" for the Work Place is a great idea - especially for those of us that work on a global level. At Virtela, I have daily contact with employees that work around the globe, we rarely talk but we do work well via e-mail. Having a "My Space" for the work place would personalize our work relationships.
Thanks for the idea. I defitely predict this would be a huge benefit.

Adi
http://www.virtela.com