Following months of speculation that Facebook was entering the enterprise social networking space, the social media giant has finally revealed additional information about it’s Facebook at Work service.
Since breaking the news last week, several analysts have discussed how Facebook’s move into the enterprise market might play out.
Research analyst Mike Gotta offers Gartner’s collective thoughts on the announcement below.
Why would Facebook get into the enterprise space now? Is it too late?
Even though enterprise social networking has been around for several years, many organisations still struggle with adoption.
We’ve learned that behaviour change is difficult and deploying “social as a destination” site can create a silo disconnected from people’s everyday work activities.
Over the past few years, the market has shifted emphasis of the destination site model to one where social capabilities are contextually integrated into productivity tools and business applications to provide a better sense of purpose.
Strategists often believe that “social in the flow of work” alleviates behaviour change challenges and helps with determining business value since the work activity typically has some type of metric.
However, this shift does not mean that there is no value in a destination site. Since employees likely use Facebook as a consumer, there is a familiarity that can be tapped into by offering an “at work” experience.
A credible argument can be made that workers are more productive when they use tools that allow them to apply the same skills and literacies across digital work and life.
Consumerisation and BYOx trends reflect this viewpoint where organisations are becoming more receptive to managing a diversity of devices and applications. However, Facebook still needs to position its business offering in a purposeful manner.
What possible scenarios could Facebook emphasise?
We would expect Facebook to work closely with its early adopters and future partners to identify use case scenarios that illustrate practical business scenarios.