Making money with this article is easier than I thought….

I guess people also fought for the “world is flat” theory. Change is hard to accept.

What’s the business value of Facebook? Well, what was the business value of any new IT innovation of the last 30 years? PCs, local-area networks, PDAs, the Web, open source, instant messaging and blogs all came under a lot of criticism in their early days because they challenged the established order of centralized control or were seen as toys. Second Life was blocked by many companies. It fell off the map for a while, but is reportedly having its best year ever, is profitable and just introduced a corporate version.

No one knows what the business value of these new technologies is at the outset. If people are allowed to play with them, they figure it out. Twitter befuddled people when it came out nearly three years ago. Now it’s one of the most important tools in marketing and customer service. That’s because people figured it out.

Most security problems can be dealt with through education. Virtualize the desktop, don’t allow anything to write to the hard disk and tell people not to install apps. That’ll head off most of the problems.

Blocking new technology presumes that intelligence lies at the center of the corporation. That idea has been pretty thoroughly debunked. Read Doc Searles’ recent post on that. Modern businesses move decision-making to the end points and trust their people to innovate?

The research I’ve seen cited earlier this year reported that 80% of enterprises surveyed are blocking Twitter and Facebook at work. I’d like to see more substantive research as 2010 begins on whether that move is a competitive differentiator for them.

The productivity questions seem to come up most often when I’ve talked with CIOs – what business purpose does Facebook serve, exactly? – but they’re rather reminiscent to the concerns I’ve read about the introduction of the Internet to corporate desktops in the 90s or telephones earlier in the 20th century.

I’m unsure if the telegraph was regarded with chagrin. Perhaps because no vampires or flying sheep awaited their operators?
The issue is clouded by some gray areas, like the access through smartphones that Adam referenced above, or usage at home that would familiarize them with the external platforms without opening corporate networks to additional risk.

If, as Professor Andrew McAfee & MIT professor Eric Brynjolfsson have reflected in their books, better use of IT and social computing does lead to demonstrated greater productivity, retention and knowledge capture, we’ll be able to see if more conservative approaches will be consigned to the dust heaps behind the loony bin.

I like being able to dip in and out to external social networks throughout the day but I’m still left a bit curious about what the business case will be for them will be in many industries if comparable platforms are provided internally if an employee isn’t in a customer-facing role. I can make a case of journalists — and I have some ideas for making the case in many other professions — but I’d like learn more from you about how you’d make a case to no-nonsense CIO or to a security officer concerned about employees being spear phished or allowing malware in through a shortened link.