Designing Social Interfaces, 2nd Edition

Chapter 17. Corporations Are People, My Friend

Why do Star Trek captains have to say the log date themselves instead of the computer auto-inserting it like any blog? Why does Picard have to keep saying “Tea, Earl Grey, hot”? Because they run Enterprise software.

—KEVIN MARKS, IN A COMMENT ON JOHN SCALZI’S GUIDE TO EPIC SCIFI DESIGN FAILS—STAR TREK EDITION

THE ENTERPRISE MARKET IS A SLOWLY WAKING GIANT. Enterprises are gradually moving toward the use of social experiences to enable and empower their organizations. This market has traditionally been ill-served by software that is hacked together from competing providers. Many IT and HR groups figure that their users (their captive employees) can just learn the software and make do. With companies tightening their belts and cutting costs and waste as much as possible, time spent “learning” bad software shouldn’t be tolerated. Alternatively, some teams would like to use consumer tools for their work, but many of those services host the user’s content and data and are not secure or usable with other tools inside a corporate firewall. In most cases, the IT departments can’t sanction this practice for a variety of security and legal reasons. In large corporate environments, using tools outside the firewall for business purposes and storage can result in an employee being fired.

With teams geographically dispersed, tools with social features are needed more than ever inside the enterprise environment. The challenge, however, is that these ...