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When should corporate firewalls act more like cell membranes?

I’m headed over to the airport, for a trip to the Intuit mothership in Mountain View. I’ll be there for a series of meetings, which should result in moving collaborative efforts behind the firewall further along. My main interest in this is social networking behind the firewall. (I’ve posted before about how it would be a good idea for corporate directories to be more like facebook.)

As part of the process I’ve spent some time poking around in IBM’s Lotus Greenhouse, which is their beta environment for things like Connections. (If you have access, you can find me and my experimental blog in the greenhouse.) I think it is great that IBM is actively soliciting feedback and letting users kick the tires in that environment. The most important change I think they need to make is to support users directly connecting with each other: give me contacts, friends, whatever you want to call them, but let me connect with people. That is, after all, what social software is for.

This extranet-like beta environment also has me thinking about the firewalled world in general, and how I think there will be increasing pressure — from employees — for a more flexible environment. As the use of social tools (blogging, del.icio.us-style bookmarking, wikis) expands behind the firewall, I think we need to ask questions about the value in creating corporate walled gardens.

I don’t mean in the the way that question is more frequently thought of, either. Not the overly suspicious “what is the ROI of employees blogging?” but poking at the assumption that everything needs to live behind the firewall. There is a risk that dark blogs have the potential to scale the echo chamber to deafening proportions faster than the public web. Now, this can be mitigated by the bloggers themselves reading, writing about, and linking to folks on the outside. I see internal Intuit bloggers linking out to great stuff all the time; but I worry that a large enough company blogosphere could still be an impoverished one, compared to the public web. It makes me happy when I see what I think of as “permeable firewall” experiments, where the firewall functions more like a cell membrane — such as the Avenue A | Razorfish intranet’s use of publicly generated del.icio.us tags.

I realize there are things — trade secrets, financial data, etc. — that always make sense to keep off the public web. When we get social networking a la facebook/myspace/yasn at work, I know I don’t want my profile info out here. I don’t want to publish my private cellphone number to the world; I don’t need cold calls from recruiters who have harvested my info. And there are things that aren’t ready yet — not everyone is willing to share their still-baking ideas with the world.

Of course, I am. That’s part of why I have a blog. As we we trend toward more transparency, I expect to have even more company.

Enjoyed your post. It’s funny how after all these years and all of this technology people connecting with people is still so revolutionary. But it is isn’t it? I have been focused on transparency for the last couple of years. I am particularly interested in thoughts on the relationship between transparency, ethics, and corporate responsibility - especially from the perspective of failures, successes, and lessons learned. I am publishing on the topic and am looking for good stories and lines of inquiry. One operating hypothesis/possible wishful thinking is that it raises the risk profile of an organization when it is not focused outward as well as inward, and that the permeability payoff is insight, transformation, learning - both individual and corporate. Another possible payoff is survival. So for example organizations should celebrate and promote samizdat, engage with our fiercest critics, because the unknown unknown that will change everything is likely to be found in those dialogues. Poppycock?

Not poppycock. I think that organizations that are able to embrace openness will discover the value in the “unknown unknown” and the ones who don’t will be disrupted by it. (It’s innovation when you do it but disruption when your emerging competitors do it, right?)

As for linking transparency, ethics, and corporate responsibility — I enjoy seeing businesses that are betting big on folks caring about (even insisting upon) the interdependence of those things to be “good guys” and win. To me, the most obvious example of this succeeding is Whole Foods.

Sounds like you’re working on some really interesting issues, I’d like to hear more about your ideas.