Companies are spending more on social and collaboration software, as new tools compete for workers' attention.
Companies are looking to implement more social tools within their internal structure and to engage employees in collaboration and knowledge-sharing. But how does company management do this effectively, beyond just picking the right technology? Analyst and futurist Stowe Boyd led a rousing discussion at GigaOm’s Net:Work conference Thursday, exploring how large companies can make changes internally and motivate team members to be involved in the process of moving toward more enterprise-wide collaborative processes.
When implementing a new system that inherently requires employee participation like an internal “social networking system” such as Socialcast (see disclosure), you have to let your employees choose to be there, “not be forced to be there.” So said Jeff Ross, Technology Business Consultant at health insurance giant Humana. Employees have to see an environment that calls to them and companies should make sure employees’ needs are met.
One of those needs is true, seamless integration of the technical tools they’re asked to use. Social collaboration tools should be at “every step of the workflow, not a separate place,” said Timothy Young, founder and CEO of Socialcast, who adds that companies need to take both a bottom up adoption approach as well as demonstrate top down support to pave the way for widespread adoption new technology such as collaboration systems.
Ross said that company management needs to understand what motivates their employees as well as know what behaviors they want to encourage. Motivations for adopting internal enterprise collaboration tools can be social interaction opportunities or getting answers to business problems or simply to help others.
Humana uses a “social reputation proxy” as Boyd put it as added incentive for employees to participate in their Socialcast collaboration community, nicknamed “Buzz,” including virtual badges, coins and trophies to demonstrate their participation level to fellow team members. Out of 28,000 Humana employees, about 7500 have joined “Buzz” since May without any formal company-wide efforts with about 1000 employees signing up each month.
With employee adoption and engagement of social collaboration tools, companies see improvement in key performance indicators, said Young.
COMMENTARY: Socialcast is the first company I have seen that connects the business systems (accounting, ERP, CRM, etc.) a company uses everyday into a Twitter-like social network with tools for enterprise-wide communications and collaboration.
Socialcast has developed a centralized platform that solves the problem of poor employee engagement and productivity due to information overload and detached operating units. Socialcast's software creates a flexible, simple, data-rich collaborative space where employees can find information from applications, systems, and people across the enterprise--no matter where they are physically located.
Here are the highlights of the Socialcast platform:
- Increase Efficiency - Data and information move between applications and users, and from users to teams, faster than ever before. Improve information flow by opening the lines of communication, turning your company into an incubator for collaboration.
- Improve Productivity - Eliminates "work about work" - the unnecessary meetings, emails and calls that fail to produce results. Help employees perform their best by allowing collaboration and discussions to occur outside of time-draining activities.
- One Central Information Hub - Capture the knowledge that's currently living inside your employees' heads, their inboxes, and buried deep within shared documents by creating a real-time enterprise social network that becomes a central hub for information-sharing.
Socialcast basically ties all the loose ends within a business enterprise, and providing one centralized hub where all information no matter where it originates--within or outside the organization--so that information can be shared and acted upon within the framework of social network.
Having worked for several Fortune 500 companies, the sharing of information in a large organization can be quite challenging. Employees deal with other employees at the corporate, division, departmental and branch level. Corporatioins operate through information lock boxes consisting of intranet portals, extranets and websites. Information sharing and collaboration becomes even more vital and complicated for multinational organizations with dispersed locations throughout the world. You encounter time zone issues and language barriers, yet the information has to be acted upon in a timely manner. Do you call, email, fax or text message? Do you need to make a presentation in real-time or face-to-face? The social network may have changed everything.
I am still amazed how the Socialcast platform can offer so much. I don't think I have seen social networking, project management, file and document sharing, network security and real-time communications rolled into one system like this one. It's seamless integration with Microsoft Sharepoint for the enterprise is certainly an advantage, since so many large businesses now use SharePoint to share files and documents.
Socialcast offers three different pricing plans for users:
- Basic Package - FREE of charge. Create a free community, pilot, or proof of concept to explore basic features.
- Small Business - Pricing starts at $3 per user, per month for communities with up to 1,000 employees.
- Enterprise - Pricing based on your company's specific requirements. Deployments for 1,001 - 200,000 users with volume pricing.
Socialcast provides its users a number of resources to improve and enhance their social collabration platform:
- Socialcast Videos and webcasts - Library of quick tutorials to get a jump on getting started
- Socialcast Educational Materials - Guides to best practices and network adoption
- Socialcast Customer Stories - Case studies from Socialcast customers
- Socialcast Customer Support - Convenient way to get answers about Socialcast questions
- Developer API - Socialcast's Applications Programming Interface or API for integrating Socialcast with user enterprise systems
- Socialcast Blog - Thought, leadership and infographics
If you are wondering how you calculate the ROI of social enterprise software, Socialcast has the covered with this very interesting infographic:
Socialcast is no early stage startup, but has been designing and deploying social collaborative tools since 2005. From the beginning the company has concentrated on developing superior technology and providing the best customer service in the industry. The Company's Mission is "to help clients solve distinct business challenges using innovative software and a people centric approach."
Industry research shows that the market for collaboration software used by corporations—commonly called Enterprise 2.0 technology—is growing, despite the sluggish economy. Gartner, an information technology industry analyst group, began tracking revenue growth of social business software in 2009. Gartner predicts the market for enterprise social software technologies will continue to grow from $664 million in 2010, $769 million in 2011 and $1.3 billion by 2014.
As the popularity of social collaboration software grows, companies are sorting out which tools are most useful. A 2010 Gartner survey of 416 U.S.-based IT professionals shows that e-mail remains the favored communication tool in the office. However, these same IT professionals are betting that collaboration tools will burrow a niche in daily business operations.
Forrester Research, in a survey of 934 North American and European collaboration and software decision makers, found that many professionals planned to buy "team workplaces," or tools that share data, documents, and calendars among workers online, while allowing users to track changes to shared content.
Professionals also planned to implement more Web 2.0 tools—wikis and microblogs, for example—in business. However, IT professionals were less likely to want "unified communications," which allow employees to check each other's availability, in real time, on shared calendars, and then choose between voice, video, e-mail, or instant messaging to initiate conversations.
Gartner's revenue analysis shows that North American businesses are more likely to adopt social business software than businesses in other regions. In 2009, North America accounted for 60 to 65 percent of enterprise social business software revenues. Europe and Asia made up 25 percent and 10 percent of revenues, respectively.
Looks like competition within the internal-use social collaboration software markeet is really beginning to heatup along the same pace as regular consumer social networks. You can read about it HERE.
It certainly appears like Socialcast is very well managed and ideally positioned to take advantage of the anticipated growth in social collaboration tools.
Courtesy of an article dated March 31, 2011 appearing in Technology Review and an article dated December 9, 2o10 appearing in Gigaom
Comments