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The question is on my mind due to today's official launch of BroadVision Inc. 's new Clearvale enterprise social-networking platform.

I spoke with Giovanni Rodriguez, chief marketing officer at BroadVision, because I was interested in the role of the CIO and the IT department in implementing these kinds of solutions. (Clearvale is a product-and-service suite that uses templates to let enterprises easily create and connect multiple business networks to connect employees, partners, and customers. It's currently being tested in some 4,000 organizations, Rodriquez said, with a couple of dozen "reference customers.")

"The IT department are generally not the ones who start these projects," Rodriguez said, "but they come in and bless them if they get big enough. If they're small they just ignore them."

Instead of IT, the initial decision may come from HR, which often "owns" the enterprise intranet, or from marketing, which is interested in using social media for CRM. Sometimes the impetus comes from the CEO, who is looking for "a new way of doing business."

If business units and individual employees are doing this stuff on their own, Rodriguez said, that leaves the CIO with an "evolving role" centering around education, support, and best practices -- including the responsibility for security and privacy.

From Rodriguez's perspective, it makes sense to start small with Clearvale in various parts of the business, and then add more networks to ultimately become a collection of small networks. He compared it to having multiple, virtual water coolers where different groups gather, discuss, and share. "Business is done in [small] groups," he noted, not by an entire enterprise all on one project. So Clearvale is deliberately designed to grow on ad hoc basis into a network of networks as people add their own groups and applications. (The company is planning a Clearvale "app store" for the fall.)

I agree that organic growth approach does indeed mimic the way social networks grow most naturally. But from an IT perspective, the prospect of taking responsibility for a networking platform already in place and growing on its own completely terrifies me.

I see a nightmare scenario where the CIO ends up with responsibility for social-networking security, privacy, reliability, etc., but either can't get or doesn't bother to get full visibility into the system and all its various networks. CIOs can't be seen as a roadblock for these kinds of projects, but they can't be the last to know about them either.

Smart CIOs need to get ahead of the curve and either bless -- and then drive -- the particular solution the business wants to use, or find an alternative that meets the needs of the business and IT.