I just came across an article on Information Week titled Can Google+ Become A Biz Collaboration Tool?. This discussion has been going around for a while, and my reaction was…

ARGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

I know, consumerization of IT has been a theme in the business market for a couple of years now, and I see it as a very healthy debate. Business software does indeed need to be made less clunky and more end user friendly. But to say that you can design a software for end users to connect with others, have fun, play games on, share that cool video and those pictures, have public conversations on – and simply plug into into business use – is taking the argument too far. 

For one, the security and policy needs of consumers and businesses vastly differ. If people start using Google + for business, be sure of a lot of disastrous "reply to all" moments. Here are a number of ways in which business and consumer needs differ, and why Google + can not be just plugged into business.

Permissions. On the one hand, you want to encourage information sharing across the organization, but it must be balanced with some information which must be constrained to some groups – legal, financial, private information. Again, within even the same group, level of access to information allowed to different people will differ according to role.

Multimedia vs. Documents. The onus on consumer groups is to share multimedia information, while in the business context it is more in textual form – word documents, spreadsheets, or specialized file formats. 

Collaboration vs. Sharing. Social networks like Google plus are geared for sharing of information, rather than multiple people working together on it, i.e., sharing vs. collaboration. Both needs exist in organizations where you may need to share content with others, but also work together on documents, projects etc. 

Another problem I have with Google + is that is does not integrate with other Google Apps modules. It is just a disjoint new feature. It may have some use cases for business, but do you want a disconnected new module where you lock part of your organizational information in?

I suspect not!