As people embrace social media in their private lives, they naturally expect to use similar tools within the enterprise.

This is one of the findings of a research report conducted by Jakbo Nielsen of the Nieslen Norman Group. The report tracks 14 companies in 6 countries and addresses how social technology is being used on their internal networks (intranets). Nielsen provides a summary of the report in this blog post. The full report can be purchased from the Nielsen Norman Group site for $298.

Most of the findings are in line with the operating principles behind Decision 3D.

Some of the key findings include:

• Slow adoption of social technology will risk losing workers who expect innovation in the outside world to reflect directly on how they communicate at work.
• The majority of social technology implementations began life as grassroots initiatives.
• Initiatives that were deemed successful and continue to provide value were predominately built to meet business objectives  and not just for the sake of technology.
• Social systems tend to be “self-policing” from within the community itself, and requires little “management control”; in fact too much management control tends to reduce the effectiveness of these systems.

My thanks to Bill Ives of the FASTForward blog for the pointer.