Interesting new research has emerged from an unlikely source around the use of enterprise social networking. The Times Education Supplement's publisher TSL Education released new research from a larger study snappily titled The Digital Staffroom: How Social Networking and resource sharing are transforming teaching, showing that online collaboration could save 14.3 million teaching hours a year by 2012.

The survey of 5000 teachers found that TESconnect, a newish social network and resource sharing platform for teachers, has benefited the community by allowing teachers to come together and share their lesson plans. Seems quite trivial, but to put it in perspective, the research said TESconnect users save an average of 31 minutes in preparation time a lesson by downloading existing resources.

Of course, the lessons learnt here - if you pardon the pun - can be applied outside the teaching sphere to most organisations. Marti Harris of Gartner told me the pharmaceutical industry is big on this kind of thing, as a way for professionals in this field to share information and so on. What's so useful about social networking platforms when applied to the enterprise space is that they provide a formal enough structure for knowledge management and the sharing of ideas, but are flexible and loosely structured enough that members don't feel restricted in any way.

As she mentioned, this kind of collaboration could be done by email or in a content management type way, but to do it via a social network is much more natural and likely therefore to encourage better results. And this is true whether it's being used internally within an organisation, in a customer-facing way, or cross-organisationally, as with the TES example.

Of course some organisations will fear letting their employees loose on something that is not yet fully proven in the enterprise space. Security concerns and privacy issues are real and must be addressed before you'll want to embark on a project similar to TESconnect. It's a fascinating area of growth though and is likely to take off in particular as a new generation of graduates enter the workforce, who have grown up using Facebook et al. Harris boldly predicted that elements of social software will become part of our desktop productivity suite before long - it will be interesting to see if she's right.