Unless you’ve got a penchant for catching up with friends on Facebook or whiling away the odd free moment browsing videos on YouTube, chances are that the latest phase of the internet revolution has had minimal impact on your work. But the social media tools that keep school and college leavers so enthralled – the blogs, the social networking sites, the mobile devices and so on – aren’t just restricted to the consumer world. Business functions such as payroll are rarely at the forefront of the adoption of new technologies – but this is one occasion where new kinds of tools could help make the profession's life a lot easier.

That’s certainly the view of large organisations like Pfizer, which has been experimenting with the use of the latest generation of Internet-based tools, albeit on a relatively small scale. If a blue chip company in a heavily-regulated industry is prepared to experiment with different ways of working, it’s probably time for the rest of us to take a look and see what’s happening.

So-called Web 2.0 technologies (as opposed to the ‘1.0’ technologies of the first internet wave) originally took off in the consumer space with the emergence of blogging and social networks such as MySpace and Facebook. What distinguishes them is the fact that they’re easy-to-use (not always an attribute of traditional business software) and they provide a platform for user-generated content, videos on YouTube being a prime example. Instead of being fed material by professional media in the form of newspapers and local television, for example, Web 2.0 is all about citizens sharing their own videos, observations and opinions. In addition, they’re typically accessible online: rather than running software applications on your own systems, most of these tools are run for you by the service provider, and you simply access them over the internet.

There’s a whole host of different services available, and many of them are now moving into the business world. Blogs are a good example. Although they’re often derided – there are far too many people out in the ether writing up their trainspotting exploits – the blogging platform does provide a cheap way for organisations to communicate internally and externally. Some chief executives use them as a platform to share their vision with employees about where their industry is heading: other companies use them as vehicles to update customers on future product plans or support issues. You can link easily to other documents or websites, and because recipients leave comments that can be viewed by the whole community, it’s a great way of communicating to a large group without clogging up everyone’s email inbox.

Wikis – which are websites where multiple people can read and edit content, like the online encyclopedia Wikipedia – are also getting a lot of airspace as a tool to help companies collaborate. Rather than sending out a document to multiple people, getting five sets of corrections back and trying to compile them into one document, wikis provide a central site where participants can jot down notes and work on one version of a document that’s updated in real-time by everyone.

Both these types of tools have potential uses in payroll. Running a blog might be more effective for communicating some types of payroll-related changes, for example, particularly where a lot of people are likely to be asking the same kinds of questions or giving similar feedback. Again, employees can comment publicly on the blog entries, and the payroll team gets a chance to respond publicly too – so instead of answering the same question 20 times, it might get away with answering it just once.

Similarly, there's nothing to stop payroll managers setting up a wiki to let employees air their thoughts about potential improvements to the service and float their own ideas about planned changes. Say payroll wants to reduce the number of hours in the day that it takes telephone enquiries. By mooting the idea online, explaining the business rationale and inviting comments, it looks like they're seeking consensus – and they may get less resistance to change as a result. Alternatively, they might receive better suggestions from employees – there’s no reason why the payroll team should be the only group coming up with good ideas. Departmental wikis can also be used for building presentation slides with colleagues and sharing documents.

Some Web 2.0 tools are also useful for sharing knowledge. Social bookmarking services such as delicious let you bookmark web pages you’ve viewed and tag them with descriptions – effectively allowing you to build a directory of your favourite sites. If one of your HR employees is an expert in the technicalities of maternity leave, for example, browsing the web pages they recommend is likely to turn up a good selection of sites for someone else's research. Again, this could be another way of reducing call volumes for payroll: if employees know where to find specialist information, they may go there direct and carry out research for themselves. In this respect, the tools are no different from HR and payroll self-service: it’s just the same as putting employees’ pay information online so they can access details of past payments without picking up the phone.

Then there are social networks, which are increasingly being used by business professionals to keep in touch with contacts, put feelers out for jobs – and increasingly, to hire people. Business-oriented services such as Linkedin are a great way of building communities around specific areas of expertise. If you get involved and get networking, the next time there's a vacancy on the payroll team you may be able to fill it through your own contacts.

Bear in mind that this isn’t just business theory. In a survey of IT directors published by McKinsey last year, 75 per cent of respondents said they planned either to maintain or increase their use of new collaborative technologies. Around a third of respondents were looking at blogs (31 per cent), wikis (33 per cent), and podcasts (35 per cent), while almost four out of ten were interested in social networks (39 per cent).

Pfizer is one company that’s already been experimenting. Two of the protagonists behind the pharmaceutical giant’s Web 2.0 initiatives spoke at last autumn’s ‘Office 2.0’ conference in San Francisco (Office 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 are the names often applied to using Web 2.0 technologies in a corporate environment). One of them, Simon Revell, explained how he was driven by sheer frustration at the communications problems that blight every business – like having to wait for a meeting with your boss to get things done, or finding things that really matter getting buried or lost in someone else’s inbox. After attending a conference in Edinburgh, he wrote up his notes online and was taken aback by the volume of emails they generated, largely from viral distribution. Revell and his colleague Scott Gavin subsequently set up an internal blog that’s now become a hotbed of ideas.

Since then, they’ve both been promoting the whole Enterprise 2.0 philosophy at Pfizer, arguing the case for the power of blogs, corporate wikis, social bookmarking, social networks such as Linkedin – and hosted project management software that can be accessed online by everyone who needs it.

As with any technology, of course, there may be challenges. Andrew McAfee, associate professor at Harvard Business School and an acknowledged thought leader in new forms of web technologies, is a passionate advocate of Web 2.0 tools in the work environment. Even something like Facebook, the social networking site, has a business use, he says. It’s a great tool for getting an update on the status of a project or finding out when people are travelling – and it provides a ready pool of high-quality contacts for him to poll for his research work.

But McAfee also warns that there are a number of barriers to adoption to these new tools, as he told a conference in San Francisco last autumn run by enterprise software giant Oracle. For one thing, while some early adopters are pushing ahead with Web 2.0 initiatives, it’s still early days – we still don’t really know how easy it is to deploy them on a large scale across an organisation, or just how great the benefits could be. That makes it harder to build a business case.

There are other challenges to bear in mind, not least from an IT perspective. Security is always an issue, particularly for services that are hosted externally, and there will inevitably be concerns about the wisdom of adopting new technologies from a range of different vendors, some of them small start-ups.

Just as important, organisations may need to rethink some of their assumptions about the way their employees work. If your payroll manager is writing a blog on something tangential to payroll, or commenting on a change of HR policy in your organisation, is that a positive thing – or are they wasting company time?

These issues aside, can payroll itself drive a Web 2.0 initiative? If other organisations’ experiences are anything to go by, the answer is a definite ‘yes’. While IT departments typically take a centralised, structured approach to adopting new technologies, Web 2.0 tools tend to be more unstructured, breaking down traditional corporate barriers. As a result, their implementation is often driven from the ground up, by enthusiasts like Revell and Gavin, who see an opportunity to improve the way they work and decide to run with it.

And the great thing about these Web 2.0 tools is that they can be implemented relatively cheaply – so if you try something out and it doesn’t work, you won’t be breaking the bank.

This article was adapted from an article written by Keith Rodgers in ‘Payroll Professional’, the magazine of the Institute of Payroll Professionals. For further information about the IPP visit www.payrollprofession.org