Fear of Folksonomy

I'm a big believer in the saying that some things are better left unsaid, but in the age of Twitter, Facebook and teenagers running up thousand dollar phone bills by texting, I seems that everyone wants a chance to say what's on their mind (even bloggers...).

I had the opportunity to deliver presentations and demos in a SharePoint 2010 SDPS (SharePoint Deployment Planning Service offering) for a customer who was very interested in the new social networking and communities features as a way to get physicians to collaborate on specialties and practices.  I deployed the 2010 RTM bits on my Hyper-V environment and built an 'Org Chart' out of reporting relationships in Active Directory, and imported some managed meta data from a company in Germany that provides meta data... check out their offerings here.  Very cool!

We demonstrated document and page tagging, document rating, and 'tag cloud' features (among other things), and then one of the participants started to look a little worried.

It never fails - a 'cool feature' to one customer is an absolute nightmare to another...

The discussion started with a question on how to control the ability to tag pages and documents, so that search wouldn't be influenced by people randomly tagging pages, and led to a discussion of the managed meta data service and ways to 'lock down' taxonomy facets and allow business subject matter experts to manage taxonomy.  There was a great concern that some employee might decide to tag a document with something like 'this sucks' (pardon the language), and this led to a discussion on whether the use of Microsoft Forefront could help police language used in social tagging.

I absolutely understood and sympathized with their concerns - nobody wants to demonstrate a great new collaboration tool to an executive, bring up the tags and notes associated with a press release announcing the executive's recent promotion and read a tag that says 'idiot'... that would be the definition of a bad demo.

So, how do we introduce the full set of social networking capabilities and benefits into an organization that wants some structure and ground rules?  As I always say, the technology is the easy part.  One approach would be to prohibit people (all, or selectively) from tagging pages and documents. The social tagging features of SharePoint 2010 are enabled by default, but you can disable them by removing the Use Social Features permission through the User Profile service.  See here and here for more information.

Another, more complicated approach is to undertake the change management needed to educate and train users, and think through just how this type of information might be monitored and harvested for the benefit of the organization.  If tagging is introduced as a way to help the organization understand and gather employee feedback, and it's made clear that the feedback is *not* anonymous and no inappropriate comments will be tolerated, there will always be the random 'this sucks', but those tags can be traced directly to the author for a 'heart to heart' follow up discussion with HR...

And just imagine, what if these features were available at Enron and Goldman Sachs, and small handfuls of employees started tagging financial information or trading reports with things like 'unethical?' ?

Maybe we're not ready to hear everything that everyone has to say, but maybe we could be...  I'm interested in seeing where social networking can take hold in Corporate America and seeing where it leads.  Remember, the technology is the easy part.