One of the conclusions from our discussions on Facebook in the organisation was that Facebook is just a tool to maintain relations, and that as a tool it may not be ideal for use within organisations. But the way Facebook works may well be giving us a glimpse of how organisations can use such tools in the future:

Where it’s easy to share knowledge across the organisation.
Where it’s easy to find and get in touch with the people with the relevant competences or knowledge. Where it’s easy to maintain a peripheral vision of all of the relevant actions, relations, and exchanges taking place within the organisation.
Where it’s easy to form ad hoc groups and projects and coordinate and collaborate across departments, physical distances and organisational hierarchy.
Where it’s engage stakeholders outside of the organisation to participate in discussions, idea development, or mutual sharing of experiences.

Obviously, the technology is already here. There are just not a lot of organisations, which have adopted it. One company who’ve sought to experiment with unlocking this potential is IBM, which launched its own internal opt-in social network site, named Beehive, in September 2007. Since then, over 50.000 IBM employees (40% of all IBM employees) have begun using the network:

The users’ Beehive identities are connected directly to the corporate directory and organisation chart, so that every action on the site is tied directly to the employee’s corporate identity. This is done to ensure that everything posted to the site is tied to the identity and responsibility of individuals within the organisation.

This means that all users know their (their co-workers, their boss, and their bosses’ boss) and thus know how to act and present themselves. Following this, the developers do not have to monitor the site actively for inappropriate content. Instead, it is up to the users to flag inappropriate content. In the first year, they’ve only had 5 reports.

And what do the IBM employees use Beehive for? Well, first of all, Beehive is a separate site from the intranet, which opens up for new practices among employees. As Joan DiMicco, a researcher with IBM’s Center for Social Software, explains in a brief presentation, Beehive offers employees a separate space, where they can be more playful and show other sides of who they are: “They feel it’s a safer environment for sharing.”

Even though the developers have sought to encourage such a playful atmosphere, it wasn’t until senior managers and vice-presidents began posting photos of their families that other employees began feeling comfortable doing so. Now, the site is generally used to share knowledge and information that co-workers care about, such as photos of team events, opinions on the strategy, technology, and products of IBM, as well as lists of skills and competences within the organisation.

The site is proving especially apt at offering more context around co-workers who collaborate at great distances – this creates new and better ways to build relations across a huge organisation such as IBM.

Beehive is just an experiment, and nowhere near as developed as Facebook, but it is showing new ways to create and maintain relations and knowledge within an organisation. As science fiction author William Gibson put it in a much-quoted sound bite: “The future is already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed.”