Here’s an extract of an article that Simon Marshall and myself wrote last week for Orange Business Services on their Orange Business Live blog…..

Social networking usage in the workplace has gone through the roof as Generation Y employees tap into social media such as Instant Messaging, Twitter, Facebook, SharePoint and WordPress to interact with colleagues, partners and customers. As enterprises explore the legitimate use of social networking tools to gain customer intimacy and improve relationships, there are a number of factors that can make deployment more effective

Corporate social networking usage has grown out of message boards, Lotus Notes and intranets and is embracing collaboration tools and the social Web to increase productivity and profitability.  More corporates are using social networking as a response to the rise in globalization and dispersed workforces, and as a way of opening access to business-critical skill sets and information. But, there are a number of reasons why corporates must focus on achieving specific, measurable objectives in a corporate-created social networking environment that encourages positive rather than negative results.

Firstly, there’s significant evidence that social networking sites blur the lines between business and personal relationships. Although this might cause inappropriate behavior as personal lives move into the workplace, it’s more likely to cause ethical dilemmas for staff and exposure of valuable corporate brands to the vagaries of individuals or user groups. Companies can therefore struggle to delineate what social networking use is appropriate for their staff without over-reaching and denying access altogether to common tools such as Web browsers. There is some evidence to suggest that Web-browsing decreases productivity, but most firms deem it fair to allow access to a variety of Web sites and social Web applications such as Facebook, LinkedIn or Plaxo during work hours.

Who owns social networking within the organization?

Secondly, firms can fail to effectively deal with this situation because no one corporate discipline fully ‘owns’ social networking. Sometimes the IT department has control, sometimes Human Resources oversees this function. In practice it’s best to place the technical management of the social networking domain with the IT department, but have Human Resources, Sales or Marketing report to the CIO or CEO on the business benefits of such tools. IT and the CIO must meet regularly to ensure that tools are not being misused and to maintain a common fair usage policy for all employees. Problems commonly arise where listed firms must communicate material statements to their shareholders first, but run the risk of overzealous employees doing their job for them and releasing information to the general market illegally.

Finally, firms can struggle to devise a system that measures ROI. This can stem from a lack of clear objectives for the use of social networking tools. Although interaction with customers and partners is relatively straightforward to rationalize, companies must define their own measurement system that places value on employee-to-employee interaction if they are to derive full productivity benefits. Understanding how social networking tools can be used to boost discrete corporate functions helps to define who uses which applications, and with what end result.

Common internal uses include live communication and interaction based on presence applications; staff training, mentoring and performance monitoring; project collaboration; information sharing; knowledge management; social mapping for succession planning and unified communications. External uses include public relations and marketing products, events, ideas and new services; corporate social responsibility dissemination; market or competitive research; staff productivity; recruitment; project management.

Best practice for social networking

In an ideal world, the best way to tackle the challenges of introducing and benefitting from social networking is for corporates to build their own social networking framework that includes all the productivity tools employees need without recourse to them using their personal tools at work. Software developers such as Jive, Yammer, Social Text, YourMembership.com, Select Minds, SocialGO, WackWall and Ning offer different approaches.

Industry heavyweights such as the Cisco Collaboration platform provide options for big multinationals that include telepresence, unified communications and customized Instant Messaging options. Google Wave offers a centralized Web resource for collaboration across text, video, and document creation and sharing that provides an interactive record of social networking sessions.

In order to properly deploy any social networking system, best practice dictates that:

• There be a plan in place to monitor and mitigate potential reputational risks associated with inappropriate social networking site usage
• The divide between a right to know what employees are expressing online with their right to retain privacy is mitigated, and kept in context by helping them understand appropriate usage
• A code of ethics should be maintained and updated regularly, such as this one from Marks & Spencer
• Discussion of the use of social networking in the corporation must be elevated to the board level, as it is a strategic issue.

How social media adds value

• Organizational and geographical boundaries are bridged, with corporate information and discussion taking place on central, shared resources such as blogs and wikis, rather than on email or on the phone
• Teams can easily find the information they need, because social networking adds context, tags and social bookmarks to data that helps others find it more rapidly
• Employees with specific skill sets can easily connect with co-workers through user profiles and expert searches, and gain information that helps them do their job more productively.

Social media business leaders

• Best Western sponsors ‘On The Go With Amy,’ an evolving travelogue
• IBM Bloggers are encouraged to post to the site
• Coca-Cola employee Phil Mooney blogs on Coca-Cola Conversations
• Ford has pioneered Social Media Press Releases to communicate news using a variety of formats
• Kodak has dedicated a whole site to the development of social interaction with potential customers called 1000 Words.
• …As does Johnson & Johnson
• The New York Times has launched TimesPeople Beta, its social networking community
• Starbucks is currently asking its customers how to run the company, through My Starbucks Idea
• Suppository brand, Anusol, has launched a Facebook community
• MTV has extended its brand into the lives of viewers by offering an online interactive resource called Think MTV that deals with social issues.

The full article can be found here

Cloud computing is a staggeringly popular topic. Huge swathes of the work we did in 2009 related to cloud computing services and the trend looks set to continue into next year. Just about all parts of the information communications technology (ICT) industry are positioning themselves to take advantage of the predicted stratospheric growth. Although all hyped technologies will get their comeuppance at some point, cloud computing is unlikely to make much headway in enterprises if it they are worried about security.

Enterprise concerns over security are perfectly understandable: as a shared medium, how can they be sure that their data isn’t leaking into their competitors environment, and in fact are they even able to tell were their data is even stored. The latter issue can have a major regulatory impact in a number of areas, such as PCI-DSS compliance. Hackers are already reportedly rubbing their hands with glee at the prospect of hacking cloud computing environments. At the recent Black Hat conference, speakers demonstrated how to attack the cloud and a Trojan keylogger was reportedly found on Amazon’s AWS site only this week.

Given the importance of security to cloud computing’s success there’s little surprise that the industry is making solving the issue a priority. Here are some interesting resources & articles:

• The European Network and Information Security Agency has published a report on the risks of cloud computing;
• The Jericho Forum famous for its work on deperimeterisation published a white paper on cloud computing security earlier this year;
• In June, Jericho Forum and the Cloud Security Alliance joined up to address security. I was expecting to see a result on this collaboration in the autumn, but I haven’t seen anything yet;
• Ariel Silverstone suggests some metrics for measuring the security of your cloud computing providers;
• ISACA has published a white paper that looks at some of the security issues;
• The CSA and Novell are running an interesting looking webinar on Cloud security next week.

Many years ago I was a budding Futurist (not an Italian painter), someone who supposedly could facilitate groups through a process of imagining their own futures in whatever area of specialist industry they work in. I learned tools like Delphi and scenario planning. Admittedly, I wasn’t very good and so carried on being a writer….but the future still fascinates and daunts me in equal measure.

I’ve written many columns over the years about technology innovations and trends that would change the way we work/travel/make fun etc. The timescale is usually a couple of years. Looking back through this archive of deadlines missed (isn’t Google great for finding those articles you wish were buried), some technologies are finally taking hold. I first wrote about M2M in 2002, and while the there are tens of millions of connected devices in operation today, its not the billions I expected.

But does it really matter if you get the timescales wrong? (Admittedly, it does with catastrophic events like climate change) What’s important are ideas. So here are a few of the standout tech memes for the next 10 years, even though some are already 10-20 years old. Maybe their time has come…

• Convergence of robots, artificial intelligence and genetics: we’re all doomed said Bill Joy in his famous “Why the future doesnt need us”  - from Wired back in 2000
• Spimes and blobjects - the chatter of a vast internet of self-regulating motes. Bruce Sterling again.
• Vernor Vinge’s Singularity (concerned with transhumanism), Bruce Sterling’s repose, and Ray Kurzweil’s singularity (an update to the Age of Spiritual Machines)
• Why we should all live in cities if we want to save the natural world – Stewart Brand’s seminar at SALT
• Good Enough technology revolution (where the best fails, and the quick/cheap/dirty fix dominates) versus The Long Tail where niche rocks.
• Expanding cone of uncertainly and problems with predicting technological revolutions by Paul Saffo at the Institute of the Future

Could you recommend some other prophecies and memes for the Tens?

My buddy at the ITU spotted this fantastic visualisation of global mobile phone penetration. Wonderful how a bit of number crunching combined with some charts can instantly grab you. The work is done by Richard Heeks on the ICTs for Development blog.

What was instantly striking was how far Estonia has climbed the mobile penetration charts – it’s the world’s no. 2 on 188 mobiles per 100 inhabitants, sandwiched between UAE and Bahrain. Not much further behind is Lithuania on 155.

Estonia’s economy has been rocketing along – 10 years ago it had a GDP per capita around 1/3 of the EU15 average, now its more like 2/3. But even this economic growth doesn’t explain quite why the small baltic state can have such an affintity with all things mobile. Could it be the proximity to Finland and Sweden? Or maybe it was the massive investment the government made in ICTs during the 1990’s to drag Estonia out of the ashes of the Soviet state. The web site of Estonia’s Tiger Leap is here and there’s a fascinating profile of Estonia’s online and ICT development here. Did you know Estonia has 200 licensed telecom operators????

What’s interesting about this visualistion of penetration is that you can see how penetration has developed. Back in 1998, not surprisingly, Finland topped the charts at 55 mobiles per 100 inhabitants, and the average in sub-Saharan African was a fraction of 1% (actually closer to 0.1%). Now it’s around 35% (my calculation). On their own, communications don’t lift people out of poverty but they are a massive contributing factor. I could go on forever about some cool initiatives to bring mobile to the unnconnected – such as shared access to voice, mobile banking for those without bank accounts, telemedicine cabins, green base stations extending connectivity into regions without stable power supplies (and don’t say how do they charge their mobiles then)….but it might be easier to scoot along to the GSMA’s Development Fund blog or check out the UN Millennium Project which was led by Jeffrey Sachs or check out the work that Grameenphone does in Bangladesh.

The role of mobile in the developing world is a bit of a pet topic – I’ll explore the impact of mobile broadband in a future post.

Data center operators, and those that use them, are under increasing pressure to go green. Demand for data center capacity is being driven up by a number of factors that make driving efficiency through green principles a complex process.

But, the introduction of new emissions laws, such as the UK Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC) Energy Efficiency Scheme makes the greening of the data center inevitable. The CRC has been causing great concern for data center professionals, who also need to save money on energy bills – as higher energy use may have tax levy implications, strengthen their green credentials to customers or reinforce a corporate social responsibility stance on climate change.

The European Union Emission Trading Scheme, and the US cap and trade carbon emissions schemes show that the greening of the data center is fast becoming a global concern.

In the meantime, demand for data center capacity remains locked into a continual growth curve, driven by a lack of consolidation of major users,such as Microsoft and Yahoo, the advent of services such as Software as a Service (SaaS) and cloud computing, and the lack of power availability to key strategic locations such as London’s Docklands. These issues are in turn driving demand for ever more supply, heading towards a period where the gloomy predictions of analysts some years agoabout data centers running out of power no longer look unrealistic.

This is particularly the case where technical advances such as smaller hardware footprints, blade servers and high-speed processing density coupled with a greater need for storage capacity are quite literally sucking the life out of the power grid. As power consumption increases, so does the need to dissipate the heat generated by processing, which increases air conditioning costs – which also require their own power supply to deliver benefits. It’s easy to see how power, heat and cost are closely related and could easily spiral out of control.

Fortunately, data center practitioners can adopt a practical pathway to greening their data center or checking out the green credentials of their supplier, if they bear in mind several golden rules.

To read the rest of our guide to greening your data center, go to Orange Business Live: http://blogs.orange-business.com/live/2009/11/top-tips-for-greening-your-data-center.html