And, as Bob Apollo of Inflexion Point says in his blog Solution Selling – Where’s the Problem?“If your prospect hasn’t acknowledged a problem, there can be no solution.”
And that’s why I say it’s great news that we have a problem: a real set of risks - around not developing a coherent social computing strategy behind your firewall.
Back in June, in his post entitled The Facebook Experiment Christian Finn, Microsoft’s Director of SharePoint Collaboration started to articulate it thus.
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Some significant number of your people find value in social networking software, as they freely use it; and
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Many of your employees are digitally connected externally, with the tools and opportunity to share outside the confines of the firewall.
And Karen Oqvist’s post: Get to Know Your Plumbing: Protecting Your Organisation From Leaking 'Soft Information' goes a step further in highlighting the risks of not bringing social networking ‘inside the tent’ – and forcing people to build their reputations outside the firewall.
I know that Karen has posted widely on Enterprise 2.0 issues – but it is interesting to note that she spends most of her time as a Senior Security Architect at Hewlett Packard – and that she is a frequent speaker at conferences in Europe both on the subject of identity and privacy, and information security management.
In a previous post I’ve referenced that some organizations are not even turning on SharePoint My Sites because of some security risk that they can’t quite articulate or demonstrate is real.
It would be fun if what triggered a stampede of the majority into the social computing market was the security risk of not implementing.