The social media tools like Facebook, Myspace and Twitter are already being used by teams in many governmental agencies and private firms because they help knowledge workers “get the job done”.

However these tools are often a nightmare for the Chief Security Officer (if such a “C” level position exists). Regulatory compliance continues to be the main driver for security spending in most industry segments and a substantial financial burden for governmental agencies.

Sarbanes-Oxley for the USA came about after the Enron scandal and with the current financial meltdown for sure new regulations will emerge. Current US regulation is a patchwork of local, state and federal regulation.

The complexity of all the existing US regulations is such that it hinders small and medium sized businesses’ expansion into national or even multi-national market coverage even if that is exactly what the internet offers smaller businesses – the ability to source and operate like big multinational.

Most regulations deal with privacy and accountability. Sarbanes-Oxley for publicly traded firms is the big accountability regulation but smaller firms often trade with publicly traded companies and therefore indirectly will be required to comply with Sarbanes-Oxley.

Privacy is a hodgepodge of regional, national and industry segment specific laws. Obviously you cannot pretend these regulations don’t exist or hope they go away. Non-compliance may present a very real legal and financial risk to your organization.

Every bit of information exchange within the organization and with outside stakeholders must be auditable, i.e. there must be an audit trail and the kitchen sink approach to archiving of all information exchange and subsequent use of fancy search tools to retrieve information deemed to be material in a lawsuit will not work or at least be very, very expensive.

According to Ralph Losey, an eDiscovery attorney of FloridaLawFirm.com the cost of an eDiscovery associated with Microsoft is between $10 and $20 million dollars for each and every lawsuit.

Often organizations are opting not to go to court and instead just settle because litigation is becoming too expensive. Settlements are still expensive.

In the USA the Better Business Bureau shows 34 federal privacy laws that apply to business – industry specific, consumer protection, etc. Add the EU, Canada and the Far East and you are looking at 100+ privacy laws that could affect a company doing business globally.

Social media tools as we know them today do not provide an audit trail of information exchange with an easy way to access it. If you are ever the subject of an eDiscovery audit from a lawsuit, you may need to produce reports on hundreds or thousands of document transactions and other information exchanges from social media tools like Facebook and Twitter.

Enterprise 2.0 tools emerging as “social media tools for the enterprise” are as far as I can see not addressing these issues.

For the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston this coming week – June 22-25, 2009 – I see very few, if any reference to the issue of regulatory compliance! I see no mentioning of FRCP, Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, eDiscovery, etc. or discussion of audit trails and archiving of information exchanges or “record management” in the context of a business process.

These are issues we deal with when implementing process applications like our Knowledge Worker Desktop for government or private enterprises.

I will be at the conference next week trying to find out how all these powerful emerging enterprise 2.0 tools could provide synergy to our process applications.

I believe in the future we will see a movement toward self-supported definition and ownership of processes by business stakeholders and project teams. Simple interconnected utilities (enterprise 2.0+) rather than comprehensive suites (SharePoint, OpenText, etc…) will emerge.

This will help to improve the orchestration of teams, people, content and collaboration, BUT someone must be the driving process engine.

I look forward to the Enterprise 2.0 conference!

Leading up to the Enterprise 2.0 exposition here in Boston on  June 22-25, 2009, Andrew has published an interesting take on Enterprise 2.0 – “Toward a Pattern Language for Enterprise 2.0” – seen from an “academic language view” – he is at Harvard after all.

So is Enterprise 2.0 “just” another definition (buzzword) of an attempt to improve the orchestration of teams, people, content and collaboration?

I think the new 2.0 tools (enterprise 2.0 or government 2.0) are supporting a movement toward self-supported definition and ownership of processes by business (or governmental) stakeholders and project teams and we will see the emergence of simple process utilities rather than comprehensive E2.0 suites – “simple meaning easy-to-use/intuitive/inviting”.

As others have suggested maybe we should use the term knowledge media tools instead of social media tools for business and government. What is clear is that the knowledge worker is front and center in this drive towards simple support for getting the knowledge work done.

Jack Vinson has an interesting take on Culture and KM. The organizational culture need to change/adapt to supporting the knowledge workers in new ways and provide the tools and training they need to “let them get rolling”.

Too often knowledge workers are fighting a culture of control by management focused on FRCP, Sarbanes-Oxley, eDiscovery, HIPAA and other compliance requirements.

BUT can you blame management? – Very few of the new 2.0 tools are addressing these concerns. At cBrain we are trying to produce solutions where these concerns are embedded and transparent to the knowledge worker and I will discuss this approach in several future posts, so stay tuned.

To get back to Andrew McAfee’s pattern language, I find it a very refreshing way to look at knowledge work 2.0 – here is his original take on pattern language related to enterprise 2.0 work – see his post for more details:
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Patterns Where 2.0 Should Replace 1.0

Patterns Where 2.0 is an Alternative to 1.0

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Andrew is asking for feedback and I am sure we will see this concept evolve with a knowledge work focus rather than a technology focus.

Enterprise 2.0 has often been described as social software or so-called WEB 2.0 for the enterprise (inside the firewall). AIIM (http://www.aiim.org/What-is-Web-2.0.aspx) defines it as “a system of web-based technologies that provide rapid and agile collaboration, information sharing, emergence and integration capabilities in the extended enterprise”.

In contrast to traditional legacy enterprise software, which imposes structure prior to use, enterprise social software as we know it today tends for the most part to encourage use prior to providing structure.

Obviously with FRCP, Sarbanes-Oxley and other compliance issues this is a conflict and corporate management might feel under legal obligation to control and at least monitor the internal communication in order to hold people accountable for their actions communicated to others using Enterprise 2.0 tools.

Now, the question is if this is not all due to the lack of proper tools for today’s white collar knowledge worker?

And will we see Enterprise 2.0 evolve in a similar pattern to when ERP evolved from a bundle of best-of-breed point solutions to fully integrated ERP packages?

We think so and will cover our experiences, opinions and observations in this blog – stay tuned.

Traditional software tools for white collar workers today are not integrated.

Often the process of archiving information (emails, documents, notes, etc.) is a separate work routine after the work has been performed involving the knowledge worker deciding what to archive and what META data to add for the purpose of later information search and retrieval.

New integrated productivity tools like the Knowledge Worker Desktop are automating the archiving process and assuring that META data are derived automatically from the context of the work performed and NOT as a separate after-the-fact process. This has shown major improvements in productivity and quality of work.

Regulatory compliance (Sarbanes-Oxley, FRCP and HIPAA) demands that companies establish and maintain an adequate internal control structure and procedure for their business processes and for Sarbanes-Oxley also control points for their financial reporting.

The kitchen sink approach to archiving everything will NOT work. Archiving and indexing according to content (words and phrases) is better. BUT automatically archiving and indexing emails and documents (WORD, EXCEL, POWERPOINT, PDFs, E-Mails, IMs, etc.) according to context is the only viable way to ensure that you later can actually produce messages and documents that someone considers legally material, a term often referred to as eDiscovery.

Again, integration is the key driver of this paradigm shift .