Business networking software
Social networking software, such as Facebook, implement social applications using a network of 'contacts' or 'friends' - a kind of distributed address book. This turns out to have key advantages, not least of which is the fact that managing your own profile and a list of connections is far easier than maintaining an address book that contains a profile for every entry. It is interesting to apply the same idea to business software.
In the case of Facebook, the social application is communicating with friends. Compare this to e-mail applications, which focus on messages and have the address book as a kind of add-on. The first advantage the Facebook has over e-mail as a communications tool is that each user only has to maintain one profile - their own - and then just link to other people (i.e. to their profiles). This is the network aspect, which enables the second advantage over e-mail: a social communication tool where you can publish a feed of information to your network, instead of sending messages to named recipients.
In business software, user administration is the problem that corresponds to maintaining an address book. This has never looked like a problem to companies running business software, because their structure makes it natural to think of people havin roles that place them in a hierarchy of privileges, where employees are used to having a manager who grants authorisation.
However, when companies attempt global B2B collaboration with external suppliers and customers, only the largest and most powerful are able to behave as though their industry is some hierarchy with them at the top. This means that multiple companies can only use traditional business software if they agree that one of them is going to run things - administer user accounts and decide who can do what. This is the extranet approach.
Software as a service makes an alternative approach possible, where each participant signs up to the service individually, and roles and permissions are replaced by the creation of 'connections' that are the direct result of using the service to do business together.
For example, consider trading partners in a supply chain who want to share order status information. In general, they cannot give each other accounts in their own internal systems, which contain confidential data, and cannot afford to write software to feed data from one to the other. What they need is software that can let them share this data with each other, but not with their other business partners, and without giving one partner more control than another.
Business networking software achieves this by giving each user or organisation control of their own data, letting them control who is in their business network, and what access this gives them. In a way, every user is at the top of their own hierarchy with business partners below, and the rest of the world below that. In fact, a better analogy is overlapping sets of concentric circles - the overlapping business networks.
In the order management example the connections can be automatic, because each new order creates a connection - a business relationship - between a supplier, customer and a transporter. This puts each party in the other's network. Within your own network, you then share information on each order with whoever is also involved in that order - your supplier perhaps - and no-one else.
This is how the business network replaces user role and permission management: instead of one person or company having a fixed role in a software application, they have a different business relationship with each partner. In a supply chain, a company can be a customer and supplier to different partners, rather than both to everyone. In this case, the even better metaphor than the concentric circles is overlapping links in a chain, which is much more like the real-world supply chain than a corporate hierarchy.
As with Facebook, the network aspect is even more interesting, because it enables applications that are not possible in a closed role hierarchy. In the order management example, the system knows who the most popular transporter is and could expose a whole directory of supply chain participants, with information derived from their actual business activity, such as who offers which service or who performs best.
The business networking software approach is used by VisibleLogistics, which is software that enables supply chain collaboration for both small and large companies. It lets you share order management information with business partners without up-front set-up to establish a community, and allows you to keep track of your orders, suppliers, carriers and buyers.