In many enterprises today, social networking services and tools -- including Facebook and Twitter -- are used by employees, though often without any oversight from IT. Now networking giant Cisco is becoming the latest to warn that the lack of IT involvement poses problems that enterprises need to address.
Cisco's analysis comes as part of a new report it commissioned using research from global universities. The study included 105 respondents spread across 20 different countries. Seventy-five percent of respondents reported that their enterprises use social networks while 50 percent noted they used microblogging
services like Twitter.
In sharp contrast, the Cisco study found that only 1 percent of respondents reported any direct IT involvement in their social networking activities.
"There is a tremendous amount of opportunity with social media, but the big question that cropped up is what could be achieved if there was kind of formal
process in place to use the tools effectively," Neil Hair, assistant professor of marketing at the Rochester Institute of Technology told.
Among the social media platforms that the Cisco study considered are blogs and public sites like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. In the future, Cisco sees a
demand for a new class of social networking platform that isn't consumer-focused.
That shouldn't come as a surprise: Cisco itself has a series of enterprise products aimed at businesses' social and collaboration needs.
"While we think most companies are leveraging consumer social networking tools today, we certainly see the evolution to also include more private clouds
and social networking platforms to enable the types of security and interoperability requirements that we expect to see from larger enterprises," said Hans Hwang, Cisco's vice president of advanced services.
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