Email is for Grownups:
Why Business is Skeptical of Social Networking

Business is different.  Your sales people understand -- is there a more fundamental division of the market than between Business and Consumers?  But while it's crystal clear how different the markets are, the technical side is much fuzzier.  

In the best of cases, the jump from consumer to business markets is a matter of "just a few extra features."  But sometimes it's more complex. Some of those new features require architectual revision and substantial investment.  Yet with social networking software, the situation is even worse.  

Systems need to match not only the feature needs of the intended users, but also their world view.   Because businesses and consumers see the world very differently, there can be an architectural chasm between software systems designed for each.  Consider:

<li>Consumers care about economy, usability, usefulness, and fun.  They're all for freedom and openness wherever that gives them a better total experience.  Security is something that they fear and try to ignore.  They can't be bothered with monitoring or administering their systems.

<li>Businesses care about economy and usefulness, but they care surprisingly little about usability, and even less about fun.  They're all for security whenever it promises to protect or insure them in some way.  Freedom and openness are things that they fear and try to ignore.  They actually pay people to monitor and administer their systems.

It's no surprise that, in moving a product to the business market, you have to worry about issues like security -- that's where most of the "few extra features" come from.   In collaboration software, however, the goal is to help users communicate as they wish to communicate, and business communication is substantially different than personal communication.  It's more formal and more complex, with all of the challenges of personal communication magnified by the importance of forming teams, managing internal rivalries, dealing with allies and competitors, and actually getting work done as a team.

No business wants its employees to broadcast promiscuously via Twitter or Facebook -- or via telegraph or smoke signals, for that matter.  But social networking makes this easier than ever.  Compared to social network data, email is easy to monitor, and can even help to separate the internal and external communication paths.  Many organizations have evolved email etiquette and behavior guides for new hires.  It is relatively rare, these days, for the use of email to introduce a major problem.

Businesses don't know how rare that will be with social networking, but there are good reasons to be afraid.   They want to see mechanisms that allow them to feel in control before committing their most vital information to it.

It's not impossible, it's just not here yet.  IBM understood this need when it gave LotusLive an architecture mirroring organizational boundaries, making fundamental distinctions between internal and external users, and allowing much finer optional distinctions.   Google Plus, with the introduction of Circles, also facilitates finer distinctions, but without (so far) the kind of information security business requires.  And security is just one business-critical feature among many.

Businesses use email more than social networking because they need retention policies, HIPAA compliance, long-term archives, PCI compliance, and dozens of other things for which email still rules the roost.  It took over a decade for email to evolve these features and become critical infrastructure for most businesses, and social networking is much more complicated.  Give it some time.