The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region is getting a new type of
functionality from social media giant Facebook, via a digital communications
platform called Workplace.
The stated purpose of this resource is to help firms
and organizations to collaborate and communicate with each other.
Workplace includes features like dashboards with analytics and single sign-on setups. It also allows for setting up groups or prioritizing
certain kinds of posts or messages. With Facebook Workplace, users can chat
globally, videoconference or develop collaborative learning processes.
“Facebook has spent its first 12 years connecting people in
their personal lives,” Jonathan Labin, head of Facebook MENA, said in a press statement.
“With Workplace, we are now able to help users improve productivity through
collaboration on a platform that they are already familiar with. We now want to
help companies in the MENA region build connections between coworkers and
transform how teams work together. Organizations are stronger — and more
productive — when everyone comes together.”
As evidenced in an Oct. 11 press release on the new
regional offering, Workplace has been adopted by large companies for many of
their communication needs. Arabic language functionality is a plus. However, in
the minds of some experts, it seems there is a difficult choice to be made
about how to position companies for communications, and which tools will
ultimately be the better options.
Robert Plant is a professor of business technology at Miami
University’s School of Business Administration.
Responding to questions about the Facebook Workplace
offering Oct. 28, Plant said it is important to look at the use of
communications platforms and other tools from a security angle.
“It’s got to be controlled,” he said, stressing the
importance of having leverage over data sets and making sure that business
intelligence assets don’t become vulnerable to unauthorized access. “Security
is an issue that people don’t get … it’s nearly impossible to monitor
everything: you’re much better off controlling your own platform.”
With proprietary vendor solutions, Plant said, companies can
build private clouds in which data sets are tightly controlled.
By contrast, he said, companies that would select the
Facebook platform for enterprise communications will have to dig into
Facebook’s privacy notices and other obscure areas of the platform to figure
out how data are going to be used and controlled.
“Who has access to it on the other side? Where is data going
to be stored?” Plant said. “These are all important questions.”
In general, Plant warned against the default practice of
using the cheapest or the easiest platform to convey trade secrets and communicate about sensitive business ideas, and suggested that investing in
more secure platforms is a good idea.
“The last thing you want to do is combine the corporate
world and the social media world,” Plant said.
Representatives of Facebook MENA contacted for this story
declined to provide comments by press time.
