06 November 2009

Online collaboration in finance


Is it likely that the finance industry will embrace social media? I found myself back at the Centre for Global Dialogue this week to hear what banks and insurance companies really think about enabling employees, as well as a firm’s extended client community, to interact and share information using corporate online platforms.

First of all, there seems to be a lot of interest in corporate social media. Many separate motivations appear to explain this interest ranging from recruitment, to product marketing, to the simple goal of answering employees’ wishes.

Social media might also be a way to access tacit knowledge within a company. Under the right conditions, a social media platform could record valuable exchanges between employees that might otherwise never leave the water cooler.

There lies the rub.

Under the wrong conditions, the risk with corporate social media is that it functions as an all-watching big brother. Who would want to collaborate online if there were ambiguities about how the information was used and no protection of privacy?

A presentation by Marilyn Pratt was informative in this regard. Pratt co-runs a corporate social media initiative at business systems software firm SAP involving almost 2 million people. Posts appearing on the platform are moderated, but that doesn’t mean that a group of company spooks go around erasing anything that hints at criticism of the firm.

Indeed, even the really irritable posts go online in a section called the ‘Coffee Corner’. As for the moderation process, 700 of the moderators have been recruited from outside SAP. These and other comments from her presentation suggested a sophisticated online culture has developed.
 

So there are certainly some conditions where a corporate platform can work in practical terms. Reading a little into this area I recently came across a book called ‘Delete: The virtue of forgetting in the digital age’ by public policy academic Viktor Mayer-Shoenberger.

Based in Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, Mayer-Shoenberger believes that even the most sophisticated attempts at corporate best practice will fall short protecting your digital privacy. Ultimately, he argues, the solution is to place a limit on the duration that digital information is stored.

To delete periodically.

I have plenty more to report about the conference, but that might have to wait for subsequent posts.