Just so visitors are left in no doubt about the overriding cultural imperative of Facebook, the glass doors at the entrance to the company’s HQ in Palo Alto, California, are emblazoned with a single word: HACK.

It’s a term that normally fills IT executives with dread. But at Facebook, it stands for software disruption and iconoclasm ― fundamental principles of the online social network ever since its first iteration was “hacked” by Mark Zuckerberg one beer-fueled night in his Harvard University dorm after he gained access to college servers and the profiles of his fellow students.

Indeed, Facebook itself ― together with the burgeoning morass of social media in general, from Twitter to LinkedIn, from blogs to wikis, from YouTube to Yammer ― has tended over recent years to have CIOs reaching for the headache pills.

Many who are used to a corporate IT culture where users’ technology consumption is carefully prescribed and controlled have been unable to adapt to the new “social” and “consumerized” IT world, where ad hoc collaboration, real-time information-sharing and the use of whatever technology best suits a particular purpose ― frequently technology imported from the home ― are increasingly the norm.

Yet CIOs the world over who fail to understand and embrace social technology are at risk of falling out of step with the new digital reality and may even end up alienating a large chunk of their users and customers.

With more than 750 million regular users, Facebook is the overarching giant of social media, the platform against which all other social technologies must be defined. And yet, possibly due to its overtly consumer focus, it is the one that is often least understood, and most underestimated, in the enterprise.

Growing influence

Of course, millions of businesses and organizations already have broad experience of how the Facebook platform can be leveraged particularly for marketing and are using it as a means to engage with the world. Brands such as Coca-Cola can boast more than 26 million “likes” on Facebook; while Barack Obama (20 million “likes”) recently kickstarted his re-election campaign by making a high-profile visit to Facebook HQ for a live question-and-answer session, hosted by Zuckerberg and streamed on Facebook Live.

Vice president of engineering Mike Schroepfer ― who manages the team of 600 or so engineers who develop the social media site ― acknowledges the growing influence of the company he joined in 2008 when it had a mere 100 million users.

“There are millions of companies, making billions of dollars, that are completely dependent on the Facebook platform,” says the man in charge of what is, in effect, the world’s biggest cloud-based application. “So if Facebook goes down, we take down a significant proportion of the Internet. That’s a big responsibility.”

But does any organization truly understand how fundamentally Facebook is changing the nature of the enterprise itself, beyond a reliance on the social network for a customer-facing “web presence”?

Survey data from around the world shows that roughly half of all businesses, and even more public sector organizations, still ban Facebook in the workplace. Yet for many forward-thinking CIOs, this moratorium seems a futile attempt to hold back the tide of social media: it’s clear from usage statistics that vast numbers of employees are accessing the social network at all times of the day and night, not just to contact friends but also to connect with colleagues and business associates, whether on corporate devices or their own equipment.

Moreover, many of the 20 million Facebook apps downloaded every day are business-related and focused on productivity and collaboration, such as Huddle, SlideShare and RatePoint.

Group problem-solving

Schroepfer argues that any organization that blocks Facebook in the workplace is missing out on the positive effect that this kind of usage can have on a company’s collaborative culture.

“Do you think it’s important that your team works well together and communicates effectively, that it knows how to share their different contexts in a way that they can group problem-solve?” he asks. “Is that at all important to you? If it is, but you ban Facebook, you’re missing out on a huge technological leap that we’ve made to allow people to communicate, collaborate and understand information better.”

Schroepfer (or “Schrep” as he’s known to colleagues in the carefully nurtured, college dorm-like atmosphere of the company’s HQ) points to the immensely innovative culture that exists among Facebook’s own employees ― all 2,500 of whom are constantly forging ahead on everything from coding software to creating new business models to building its own highly efficient data centers.

He believes that one reason for this innovation culture is that every employee uses Facebook as a collaborative tool. “Facebook is the one company where you can get fired for not using Facebook,” he jokes. But behind this lies a serious point: “I think it’s an inherent competitive advantage of ours that our teams are so collaborative and communicative as a result of being expected to use Facebook all day. It builds cohesion, cooperativeness and a team bond I’ve just never seen anywhere else.”

That’s a strong claim from someone whose résumé puts him on the A-list of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and technologists. In 2000 Schroepfer successfully launched his own start-up, CenterRun, which developed application provisioning software, before selling it to Sun Microsystems in 2003 where he became a distinguished engineer.

Before joining Facebook in 2008, he was VP of engineering at Mozilla for three years, where he led the global development of the hugely successful open-source web browser Firefox. The 36-year-old was named one of Fortune magazine’s top 40 entrepreneurs under 40 in 2010, grouped together with fellow Facebook technologists VP of product Chris Cox and CTO Bret Taylor.

Information dissemination

Schroepfer believes this constant stream of collaboration that occurs between friends, colleagues and business associates is a powerful springboard for innovation in any “knowledge economy” enterprise. “Facebook at its core is a sharing and information dissemination platform,” he says.

“It allows you to keep up with a much larger body of information than you could if you emailed every single person individually. And this is one of the core things about the enterprise: How do you get all the information to all the people who need to know about it? How do you get as many people as possible to have a broader context on what’s happening in the business and the industry, so that when they’re making a decision they have as much information as possible? These are the core tools of Facebook; they are not designed for the enterprise, but they solve the same problems.”

And this raises a key point, already addressed by Schroepfer’s boss, Mark Zuckerberg, when he said in a recent press briefing: “Look five years out and almost every industry is going to be rethought in a social way.”

Assuming he’s right, it poses the question: Will business software vendors need to incorporate social capabilities into their applications or will companies such as Facebook, who already have extraordinary expertise in social media and access to millions of individuals’ “social graphs” (their broad network of connections), simply add business functionality to their own platforms?

Schroepfer believes there is space in the market for both ― although it’s clear he’s fully in accord with the Facebook strategy (similar to Apple’s and Google’s) of targeting the consumer first and letting the so-called consumerization of IT stamp the entrance ticket into the enterprise.

“We’re focused very intently on the consumer markets because that’s what we do really well, and I think any business can only do a very few things very well,” he says. “We do have a lot of things that people end up using in the enterprise, but it’s not necessarily our focus.”

Adding social layers

However, Facebook is clearly not content to sit back and let the likes of Salesforce.com, SAP and Google ― which in recent years have all been rushing to add social layers to their business software ― run away with the prize. “Our hope,” says Schroepfer, “is that Facebook is the engine that’s helping to power a lot of this. And the more progressive enterprises are figuring that when a product is designed well for a mass market, it also turns out to be designed really well for your enterprise.”

He points to Facebook’s recently released Comments plug-in, which allows any website, with the addition of a few lines of cut-and-paste code, to permit Facebook users to post a comment to that site. “The thing you see right away is a huge improvement in the quality of the dialogue because it’s associated with the real personal identity: it’s harder to make the snarky non-constructive comment when it’s associated with you directly,” he says.

“I think that’s a window into what can happen when these tools permeate the entire enterprise, where everyone has this tool at their disposal that they’re comfortable using, that allows them to share, communicate and find people who have similar skills or interests in the company.”

This way of working, with its seamless blurring of work and private lives, can also lead to subtler ― but no less valuable ― benefits for the enterprise, Schroepfer believes. “Primarily, Facebook allows you to learn more about the people around you,” he points out. “People here, for example, know a lot more about co-workers and what’s going on in their lives ― that they got married, won a sporting event, or whatever. And that brings the company a lot closer together than you would normally see in organizations of that scale.”

Furthermore, he argues, it’s a powerful means to unearth hidden talent in your organization. “Unlike traditional media where a small number of people speak on a topic, Facebook gives everyone a voice to talk about whatever they want, whether it be their personal lives, a subject that’s important to them, or a skill they have which you may not know about,” he says.

“And because you have this lightweight way to collaborate between groups, it allows everyone in the organization a means to contribute in some way. You may discover a lot of latent talent in your company you may not have known existed.”

Solving the hard problems

Schroepfer joined Facebook three years ago, attracted to a company clearly on the up but still with a large amount of unfulfilled potential. “I just saw this amazing intersection of ‘successful enough to prove that there’s something kind of interesting here’ and ‘not so successful that all the hard problems were solved,’” he says.

And the next “hard problem” he and his team are setting their sights on is, perhaps unsurprisingly, the mobile space. “We’re still only beginning to explore what communication and social means on a smartphone,” he says.

“If you think about what we do as people, it’s inherently a set of activities that are most interesting not behind a computer but out in the real world. You’re at a baseball game, at a wedding, with friends in the pub: what is the experience you want in the device that’s with you all the time to contextualize that experience, to share it, to enrich it?

“We’ve seen check-in based location and photo uploads and a bunch of other things, but a couple of years from now we’ll think of those things as really cute and kludgy compared to the seamless integration everyone wants. So one of our big projects is to figure out what the mobile experience should be.”

And, whatever this turns out to be, you can be sure that Facebook’s technology team will again change the way the world lives and works ― in a social way.

Photography: Eric Millette

Further reading

Moving fast, breaking things: Mike Schroepfer gives an insight into Facebook’s unique innovation culture.