Four IBMers, Joan M. DiMicco, David R. Millen, Werner Geyer, Casey Dugan recently published, Research on the Use of Social Software in the Workplace [pdf]. It focused on their Beehive social networking website behind IBM’s firewall. Beehive was launched in 2007 by IBM Research as an internal social network site for IBM employees designed to blur the boundaries of work and home, professional and personal, and business and fun.

IBM Research is looking at four main areas: understanding adoption, usage patterns, motivations, and impact. This position paper gives a brief overview of the key findings from last two: motivations and impact on the workplace. The found that within a company intranet’s protected environment, employees choose to reach out on Beehive to new people rather than only connecting to those they know, which is different than behavior reported on Facebook. They also found that employees also share personal details that have not appeared with any significant frequency within IBM on other enterprise social software tools, such as intranet social bookmarking and blogging.

Read more at The FASTForward Blog…

“At some point every few years (or every year in some cases) organisations decide that the most effective way to improve productivity or profits is to reduce expenditures.

Intranets are a common target of cost cutting, either by delaying improvements to infrastructure, cancelling new functionality, reducing author training or cutting intranet staff numbers.

In some cases these decisions are justified, however with intranets often lacking high-level representation and sponsorship, there are cases where these cuts have serious negative impacts on the entire organisation.

So are there ways to position an intranet to avoid damaging cost cuts, and even increase the budget to the area in order to generate savings elsewhere?”

Read more at eGov AU…

Intranet 2.0 strategies do exist. As defined by the 2007 Global Intranet Strategies Survey, an annual worldwide survey of intranets, the companies most likely to have a 2.0 strategy (11%) are Class 1 and the very large organisations with over 50k employees.

Applications are open for the 2008 survey.

Via Globally local - locally global.

There are a number of reasons why a corporation or a not-for-profit should adopt Intranet 2.0 tools. Enhancing communications and collaboration with employees, and improving employee investment and retention are primary considerations. But there’s another more pressing need: snooze or lose.

While the intranet still plays poor cousin to the all-important website, intranet 2.0 cannot play backseat to any organization looking to differentiate itself from the competition.

Read more at IntranetBlog.com…