Social Enterprise: Better Business Opportunity

Enterprise software are intended to link people in the organization, let them communicate & collaborate to streamline processes, improve productivity, increase the innovation, easy and fast tracking, brainstorming, share complete-updated-focused information and knowledge etc…

Few examples where communication & collaboration is important:

1. Brainstorming any issue or idea
2. Feedbacks/Follow-ups/Status
3. Task allocation and tracking
4. Various documents sharing inside the organization
5. Collecting the individuals knowledge to be used by others
6. Having some general consensus on various topics like product ideas or new features or a Policy adoption
7. Interacting with customers & providing support

In typical IT firms there could be more examples:

1. Project planning/task allocation/Tracking
2. Bug Tracking
3. Issue resolving with the help of other employees

In the past, various solutions have been used to communicate and collaborate. Some commonly known ones are emails, static web sites, intranet portals, document repository and printed/printable static contents.

These traditional tools/approaches were owned or maintained by organizations, were less interactive and less user friendly in terms of usability, interaction and more over least updated. Most of the scenarios stated above can not be served by the existing (old) methods. As all of these problems, requires user/employee participation to be very efficient.

With the advent of Web 2.0, Enterprise software has revolutionized. The term Enterprise 2.0 is coined after it. Web 2.0 being new avatar of web which emphasizes on user participation the most.

Here comes the very genuine question: what Enterprise 2.0 is offering to solve these problems?

Enterprise 2.0 is nothing but the use of Web 2.0 based tools to improvise the existing processes. Like:

1. Blogs
2. Forums
3. Wiki
4. Knowledge Sharing Systems
5. Integration of various segregated application inside the organization like project management tools, Bug tracking tools, document management system etc…
6. Pursuing Social groups or networks
7. Analytics & Reports

Couple of cases, where organizations can make use of Enterprise 2.0 tools:

1. Case One
I am new to the organization. I don’t know much people and I have a lot of queries regarding the administration, HR policies and there could be many more.

In general, it’s like bugging peers or HR every time until you gets used to of the system.

On the contrary Enterprise 2.0 solves it very easily through Wiki.  Wiki is a web site which allows you to create/edit any number of interlinked pages. This could be used in several ways like information sharing, product guidelines/overview etc.

According to Andrew McAfee post:
Office supply company VistaPrint initiated a wiki in an attempt to capture what a new engineering hire needed to know. Within 18 months the wiki grew to contain over 11,000 pages placed into 600 categories, all of them generated by employees themselves rather than a professional knowledge management staff.

2.    Case Two
In a big manufacturing company, an engineer was facing some problem. He wanted to find an expert inside the organization, but he doesn’t know to whom he should talk. Where and How to find the expert, may be from geographically different location of the organization.

But if the organization has Enterprise 2.0 tools like “Forums”. He can easily reach to experts by asking his questions on the right forum. With Forums he can have solutions from any location of the organization.

3.    Case Three
A company wants to launch a new product which is very much dependent on its outlook to get succeed. So company has created 3-4 samples and uploaded on the intranet portal to get ratings, reviews and feedback from the employees.

After a week company would have a comprehensive set of information about which sample was most rated, what other samples was missing by users review and a broad range of feedbacks to improve upon it before the product launch.

Above examples clearly states that how an organization can use Enterprise 2.0 for employees (on Intranet) and improve the productivity. Enterprise 2.0 is can be used in customer interfacing applications like CRM tools. Next example will identify how a 2.0 tool can be used for Customers and what all benefits we can have from it:

4.    Case  Four

Imagine if a product company opens up an online community/forum for its customers for improved & fast support by letting people helping each other.

According to Andre McAfee post: Set up an online community and let people help each other. As I wrote a while back, “an April 25 article by Steve Lohr in the New York Times that this is exactly what’s happening at Verizon. The article profiles Texan retiree Justin McMurry, who spends up to 20 hours per week at the community forums section of the company’s website, “supplying answers online to customer questions about technical matters like how to set up an Internet home network …”

To respond quickly and satisfying customers is just one part of it.

If the forum’s data, topics and messages could be collected and analyzed properly, to identify the areas where the customers face the problems, most in their product. Organization then can proactively handle the issues like product update/enhancements, product manual update and so on. So that user will have improved experience and less queries & need for support in future.

Similarly the data from internal (employee) community could help the organization identifying the areas for training, process improvements, to find employee orientation and there could be many more.

Analytics and reports of the social data could be a big gain to organizations in term to improve their internal and external users. If organization applies some rules or use the social data for analysis then that data can be used in various ways to improves organizations business, quality, environment etc.

Enterprise 2.0 or Social Enterprise has many debates and people have their own opinion on it like:

1. Its not solving any problems
2. It could not fit in the existing hierarchical structure of Enterprise
3. Its not safe and there are many more

In spite of all debates, facts and arguments, it is still evident that Enterprise 2.0 is really a mutiny and could be a huge gain to Enterprises, if a right solution is applied to the right problem. Big brains create wonders, if facilitated by appropriate tools.

Inspiring articles:

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Howlett/?p=1228

http://andrewmcafee.org/2009/09/e20-is-a-crock-discuss/

http://www.infoq.com/news/2009/09/Enterprise20

http://youarenew.blogspot.com/2009/05/web-20-is-not-new-coke-understand-its.html

http://www.interactiveinsightsgroup.com/blog1/social-media-examples-superlist-17-lists-and-tons-of-examples/

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