7 Facts About Social Business And Collaboration Platforms

So much has already been written about the use of social
networking for business and the need for improved collaboration. Next-generation tools purport to ‘solve
every problem you ever had,’ but what is real and what is noise? Like many new
trends, there is enormous hype about anything social today. Here are a number
of facts you need to know:

• You need to use social relationships
  at work and leverage existing expertise to move faster and be more competitive.  Since the economic slowdown of 2008, there has been an increased need to ‘do
  more with less.’ In other words, fewer people doing more work. So providing
  workers with tools that make them more productive makes good sense.
• You will need use a
  variety of social business and collaboration tools. No one tool provides enough functionality
  to solve all your collaboration needs or to connect people across geographies and departments/divisions.
• Organizations are already
  investing heavily in social business and collaboration tools. According to
  Forrester Research, the majority of large organizations (over 1000 employees)
  plan on deploying between 3-7 collaboration technologies. The majority of organizations
  under 1000 employees plan to deploy 1-3 collaboration technologies.
• These are not your
  father’s collaboration tools.  Don’t confuse new collaboration tools with
  the old knowledge management ‘shelfware’ products that largely go unused
  because it requires too much effort to populate and update the systems. And
  this isn’t Facebook, either.
• There is a new cadre of social
  business platforms. These are designed to provide a host of collaboration technologies in one platform. Some of the vendors in this space
  include: Atlassian, Cisco, IBM, Jive, Microsoft, NewsGator,
  OpenText, Socialtext, and Telligent. These tools introduce a revolutionary approach
  to collaboration. Largely eschewing email and documents, these tools deliver next
  generation collaboration capabilities like wikis, blogs, instant messaging, and
  conferencing, all integrated into a new workflow paradigm.   
• To use these
  tools, people have to change the way they work. In addition, people need to learn new collaboration concepts, concepts that
  are usually not familiar and which are not naturally intuitive. In the history
  of innovation, this revolutionary approach often fails, because it doesn’t take
  into the human factor. Why?
• Change is hard
  because people are change-averse.  People don’t want to change the way they
  work. John
  Gourville at Harvard documented this with his famous 9X problem; five years
  ago, Andrew
  McAfee directly applied this to the use of the new collaboration tools.

“The greatest challenge [the adoption
of a collaboration technology]…has to do with making technologists sufficiently
user-like–getting them to stop thinking in terms of bells and whistles
and elaborate functionality, and to start thinking instead about busy users
with short attention spans who need to get something done, and who can always
reach for email.” (Andrew McAfee). What McAfee wrote 5 years ago is even more true today, as organizations begin to spend large budgets to try and find way to connect employees.

• Alternative collaboration approaches are emerging.  These approaches incorporate new collaboration capabilities into existing workflows, in order to mitigate the need for people to change the way they work. For example, in the consumer world, even Facebook eventually introduced email into its interface. Google as well has made great strides combine Gmail with tools such as Google Voice, and Google +. This evolutionary approach to adopting social business has a much greater chance of success because it assimilates the worker psyche with collaboration goals. In the enterprise world, this is still a new concept, but it is coming. Combining next generation collaboration tools with the conventional ‘email and document’ workflow is future direction that I call ‘social aggregation.’ More on this in a future post.

Related articles: 

• Move Over Social Media, Here Comes Social Business
• Now Where Was I? 6 Strategies For Dealing With Workplace Distractions
• Is Google+ Ready For Business?

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