Brian Jackson of IT Business News Canada reports that experts are cautioning businesses to embrace rather than reject social networking.
Referencing a recent study by the Association for Information and Image Management that concluded that businesses were not on the ball about Enterprise 2.0 technologies, Jackson quotes the AIIM with a comment on the paradox that businesses claim to consider Enterprise 2.0 critical but they also admit to not knowing what it is.
The article also points out that company employees may be using social networking technologies already even without approval by the IT department (in companies that have yet to formally embrace the technology), concluding also that companies who fail to assign a project team to figure out the best uses of social media are at risk of being left behind by competitors.
Absolutely - Enterprises are too slow in the adoption of Social Networking tools. There are still a significant proportion of enterprises that ban sites like Facebook, myspace and Youtube from their networks.
It is crazy! Companies recruit people for their knowledge. Increasingly that knowledge comes from our web of connections and contacts. Yet they seek to cut off those connections when we are in the workplace.
I posed a question in my blog last week: http://ekive.blogspot.com/2008/03/corporate-web-20.html
How would employers feel if their employees blocked access to their company from their home networks so that employees could only do work related things when in the office?