Information Age: News, analysis & insight for IT & business leaders

Social and mobile technologies are changing the way that human beings interact, and the implications for business are enormous

When Facebook, the world’s largest social network, filed registration papers for its forthcoming initial public offering in February, CEO Mark Zuckerberg laid out his vision to potential investors.

“We live at a moment when the majority of people in the world have access to the internet or mobile phones – the raw tools necessary to start sharing what they’re thinking, feeling and doing with whomever they want,” he wrote.

“We think the world’s information infrastructure should resemble the social graph – a network built from the bottom up or peer-to-peer, rather than the monolithic, top-down structure that has existed to date.”

At Information Age’s recent Social and Mobile Business conference, delegates heard how social media and smart mobile devices are sowing the seeds of that transformation in a business context.

For some organisations, social technologies are bringing that peer-to-peer quality to internal collaboration. One example is mobile telecommunications provider O2 Telefónica.

A few years ago, Shomila Malik, the head of O2 Telefónica’s Enterprise Innovation Lab, was thinking about the company’s collaboration culture. She saw that it was open and participatory in face-to-face meetings but that did not translate to its internal collaboration systems. “We had an open culture in the office, but not online,” Malik explained.

That meant that cross-departmental interaction was limited. “Customer service were working in their team and IT in their team – there wasn’t enough interaction,” she explained. 

Malik decided to try out enterprise social networking technology, and plumped for tools from US provider Yammer. The software is reminiscent of online micro-blogging services, but has extra functionality for forming groups and teams within an organisation.

She quickly found that employee participation was similar to the usage patterns of public social networks – 90% of the O2 employees that signed up for the service never posted anything, while most of the content was produced by just 1% of the users.  

Nevertheless, it introduced a number of benefits. “The best thing is for on-boarding new employees,” she said. “All you need for Yammer to work is a corporate email address, so you get access to the network before any other IT systems. This means that new starters can go on Yammer and see the kind of culture and conversations that are going on. Lots of people came up to me and said it was one of the most useful things from their first week.”

Malik says that Yammer has become O2’s tool of choice for social collaboration, and it has recently been given the go-ahead for full worldwide implementation.

Next>>> Engaging the customer