WP Social Collaboration is the Future

WHYSOCIALCOLLABORATIONISTHE

FUTUREBENEFITSANDUSE CASES

Copyright ©2015 eXo Platform

02Copyright ©2015 eXo Platform

Introduction

“Enterprise social networks will become the primary communication channels for noticing, deciding or acting on information relevant to carrying out work.” - Research �rm Gartner

You might not have noticed, but social collaboration is making inroads into all kinds of organizations, from Fortune 500 giants to nimble startups. The trend is clear - we are moving from two-way conversations towards collaborative communication.

Social tools are also starting to bring the information silos, created by di�erent business systems and various communication channels, together. CRM-systems, intranets and other corporate digital tools used to be separate islands, rarely talking to each other. With social collaboration tools this is beginning to change.

In this white paper we have collected the most commonly cited bene�ts of social collaboration and spiced them up with links to cutting edge research and case studies. The focus is on highlighting the solid business reasons why organizations adopt social tools.

https://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/global/files/nz__en_uk__telecom__gbe03121_usen_socialnetwork.pdf

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Pay is the single biggest cost for most organizations. Increasing productivity is a prime concern for most senior executives - especially with knowledge workers. The problem is that the average knowledge worker spends approximately 28 percent of their time managing e-mail and almost 20 percent looking for internal information or tracking down colleagues who can help with speci�c tasks (see a report by McKinsey & Co). Email also slows down collaboration. Everybody has experienced the confusion when di�erent versions of the same document �y around from mailbox to mailbox or when some people are kept in the loop and others aren’t.

Faster access to expertise brings real productivity gainsSocial networks can signi�cantly reduce the time spent hunting internal expertise. The “does anyone know” question gets answered in a fraction of the time that it would via email. According to a study by Nucleus Research Inc, adding social capabilities to CRM systems increases sales sta� productivity by an average of

11.8 percent. Customer queries are resolved faster, more accurately and with fewer sta�.

Building a knowledge base - organicallyWhen companies use social media internally, messages become content. This searchable record of knowledge can, according to McKinsey & Co, reduce the time employees spend searching for internal information by as much as 35 percent. This is a shift away from knowledge creation by designated intranet editors, which results in woefully out of date intranets.

Social collaboration boosts bottom line through productivity gains

03Copyright ©2015 eXo Platform

http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/organization/boosting_the_productivity_of_knowledge_workers

http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/high_tech_telecoms_internet/the_social_economy

http://nucleusresearch.com/press/social-crm-and-mobile-capabilities-boost-productivity-by-26-4-percent-nucleus-research-finds/


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Bringing remote workers into the foldToday, teams are spread across the globe. Some people work from home, some work on the move. Remote and mobile work is here. Many managers say the biggest challenge with remote workers is maintaining consistently good communication. Social tools lower the threshold for communication - all those quick questions you wouldn’t send via email get a quick answer via collaboration tools. Social tools are the next best thing to actually sitting next to a colleague. And if you return from your travels you really don’t want to wade through a sea of emails to get an idea of what’s been going on - you want to glance and get back to work as quickly as possible.

Quick return on investmentIf you think about what even a small productivity gain can do in, say, a 100 people department, with an annual cost of 60K per employee you start to realise the scale of the opportunity. A 5% productivity gain would already save a quarter million per year.

2 Increase top-line through more e�ective collaboration

“Understand the social network not as your new water cooler, but as your new production line”. - Ginni Rometty, CEO of IBM

The importance of collaboration in today’s business world is self-evident. Sta� deal with increasingly complex problems which, according to many researchers, are better resolved by groups than by individuals. It’s worth remembering that information in itself is not valuable - the insights the information helps bring about are. And insights don’t usually happen in silos - they happen when information, and people, interact.

No wonder organizations invest a lot of money in their various business collaboration tools - CRMs, ERPs, etc. The problem is these numerous applications, used by di�erent teams within the same company, create their own information silos and prevent rather than promote collaboration.


http://www.businessgoessocial.net/2014/09/23/esko-kilpi-on-how-the-world-of-work-is-changing-infographic/


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Social tools can act as a bridge between di�erent in-house and third-party applicationsIntegrating disparate collaboration tools into a social collaboration platform is a great way to unify a company’s systems. Social collaboration can act as a glue that binds di�erent systems and people together.

An ad-hoc collaboration project on a big lead might include people from sales, service delivery, marketing, an employee who has worked for the potential client in the past and knows their internal culture and an external expert from the client industry.

People can collaborate within the context of the software they use most frequently at work.

The project social stream provides a summary of what is happening in the di�erent systems - noti�cations from a CRM can, for example, feed the social stream in a group devoted to a client project. No need to �ip between di�erent programs and copy and paste content from one place to another.

Discussions are easy to follow and participate in, as everyone’s social activity stream provides an overview of all projects the person is involved in.

Social collaboration tools are perfect for cross-team collaborationToday’s business challenges often involve multiple teams and skills, while companies are organized in silos and often their IT systems follow this organization. Marketing and sales teams often use di�erent software for instance, creating an invisible barrier for information �ow.

Social tools provide a perfect way to link the systems together - sales and marketing can create a common project around an activity stream that would be populated from the separate systems they use.

According to a white paper by IBM, the business processes currently bene�ting from this type of integration the most are customer service, product development, human resources, marketing and


https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/files/form/anonymous/api/library/7761166c-b1c8-4afb-92ca-65bcf271caaa/document/ff6390f6-a107-4b51-919d-56d231e78d24/media/patterns

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“Innovation happens at the intersections” - Valdis Krebs, leading expert in social network theory

Innovation is increasing in importance. Companies that concentrate on keeping the wheels in motion without actively innovating are in the danger of su�ering the fate of Kodak and Nokia. Few companies are safe in these turbulent times: the life expectancy of �rms in the Fortune 500 has declined from 75 years half a century ago to less than 15 years.

Beat your competition through innovation

sales. According to respondents to an IBM survey in 2012, 60% of companies will socially-enable their sales processes in the next two years and 54% expect to support their customer service processes with social capabilities. In the future we are likely to see even more �elds and functions that integrate social to work processes. This in turn will lead organizations to re-engineer some of the processes to better �t a more social way of doing things.

Cross-team collaboration = happier clients The most successful companies have one thing in common - they place client satisfaction at the heart of their processes - this means crossing team and departmental boundaries. For most companies this is a big challenge - how do you address a project that does not belong to any particular team? How does �nance know if the delivery has been made? How do account managers know how the delivery went?

With social collaboration integrated in the company processes and systems, the solution can be as simple as a dedicated group on the collaboration platform. Relevant people from sales, delivery, �nance and customer support should all be part of the group. Instead of having to manually update everything, the activity stream would pull in information from relevant team tools. No more learning about delivery issues from the client and chasing down the delivery guy to see what is going on.


http://adigaskell.org/2014/05/27/the-crucial-role-process-innovation-plays-in-social-business/


http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/b2ef363c-31c4-11e4-b377-00144feabdc0.html#axzz3DMhCXUle

http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2012/01/25/shift-index-2011-the-most-important-business-study-ever/

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Empower individual innovation through social toolsSocial tools are an important component in helping organizations innovate because they empower anyone to share and develop ideas. According to The Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4cp) t e c h n o l o g y - e n a b l e d collaboration/social business tools are essential in building an innovative workforce.

Foster innovation by enabling company wide interactionThis is an important shift in the way innovative ideas are generated and developed. There is a whole science behind the new approach: social network theory argues that when you are looking for new information you are often better o� exploring the weaker links in your social network because your closest colleagues are likely to know the same things you know. This is referred to as the “strength of weak ties”. It’s also widely argued that new ideas are born when di�erent worlds meet - for example when frontline sales person talks to someone in product development or IT. People with similar backgrounds often come up with very similar solutions. Your innovation team might not be that innovative after all.

Get ideas from unexpected sourcesFrontline sta� for example are often excellent sources for product ideas and tweaks, but are routinely forgotten in the product development process. Imagine an activity stream that alerts frontline sales person on a new product in development that is aimed at a customer segment she knows well: she can now chip in with an idea that the product team would not have been able to come up with because they don’t interact with the target audience on a daily basis.


http://adigaskell.org/2013/04/03/what-can-your-organisation-do-to-be-more-innovative/

http://www.soc.ucsb.edu/faculty/friedkin/Syllabi/Soc148/Granovetter 1983.pdf

http://www.orgnet.com/innovation.html


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“To win in the marketplace you must �rst win in the workplace.” - Doug Conant, Former CEO of Campbell’s Soup

Work has become more di�cult. According to Gartner, sixty percent of US jobs today involve non-routine work, up from 40% in 1975. This leads to cognitive overload which is one major reason why people dislike their work and actively disengage from it. Another major reason for disengagement is that employees have no say over their jobs and what is happening in the organization. When you are not able to make a meaningful contribution, you disengage.

Social collaboration makes people more engagedSuccessful social collaboration helps people cope with today’s demanding workplace by getting help from colleagues when needed. It also plays an important role in bringing back a feeling of personal control and connection to the company.

Deutsche Telekom, Europe’s biggest telecommunications

Build a strong corporate culture by engaging employees

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Build an ideation engine through crowdsourcingOf course social collaboration tools alone won’t turn your company into an innovation powerhouse. You need to purposefully create cross-functional teams and have processes in place on how you source and develop ideas. Some organizations have, for example, internal community managers who facilitate serendipitous encounters (serendipity is often a key ingredient in innovation), others have built whole platforms and processes that enable sta� to come up with innovative ideas. IBM for example have created an in-house crowdsourcing platform so that they ensure they utilise all the knowledge and creativity in the company.


http://fortune.com/2013/12/04/how-ibm-bypasses-bureaucratic-purgatory/

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company, is a good example of how powerful an e�ect social tools can have on corporate culture and sta� engagement. The company introduced a social forecasting and crowdsourcing tool to tap into the expertise of their employees to learn about customer needs, competition and market trends. They got that and much more: the employees started to discuss the company’s decisions, products, and goals among themselves. So in addition to market intelligence they managed to increase overall employee motivation and engagement.

Social tools make top-down communication more e�ectiveTraditional top-down communication is easy to ignore - it just sleeps in the corner of one’s screen or archived emails. A social intranet, on the other hand, enables managers to have two-way conversations with their sta� - a communication message can be posted, reshared and discussed. This not only helps to get messages across better, but also helps build trust and make employees feel more engaged in what’s happening in the organization.

Social tools can help build strong corporate cultureCorporate culture consists of the (often) unspoken rules of how things are done in the company. Together with o�cial processes and systems it forms the “software” that guides how people in the company work.

Company culture is built and reinforced whenever people interact - occasional top-down messages from the CEO or “vision statements” do very little to build corporate culture.

To actively build organizational culture you need key people to model the right kind of behaviour. Social tools in turn can play an important role in amplifying these behaviors. If the aim is for example to get employees to openly ask for help when they are stuck (which can be di�cult if the company culture has been about pretending you know everything), a thumbs up or a positive comment from a senior manager on the company social network not only sends a message to the employee that he did the right thing, but also shows other employees that it’s perfectly ok to show that you don’t know answers to all the questions.

Disengagement is a costly problemDisengagement is a serious economic issue and a costly problem to most organizations. The Bureau of National A�airs in the US estimates American businesses lose $11 billion annually due to employee turnover. Engaged employees, on the other hand, drive pro�t. Employees who care about their work o�er better service and are more productive, which in turn a�ects the whole business all the way up to higher shareholder returns.


http://www.crowdsourcing.org/editorial/deutsche-telekoms-internal-crowdsourcing/27131

http://www.employees-lawyer.com/two-way-communication-organizational-trust/

http://smallbusiness.chron.com/behavior-modeling-workplace-10980.html

http://www.forbes.com/sites/victorlipman/2012/12/14/study-explores-drivers-of-employee-engagement/

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kevinkruse/2012/06/22/employee-engagement-what-and-why/

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"If only HP knew what HP knows, we'd be three times more productive." - Lew Platt, former CEO of Hewlett-Packard

One of the most important assets companies have is the knowhow and expertise that employees accumulate over years. Capturing this elusive “silent knowledge” has been a painful problem for many organizations for decades. When an employee leaves, that valuable knowledge is gone as well. It means the organization might lose critical insights and reinvent the wheel again and again. Senior managers everywhere have spent countless hours on knowledge management strategies and spent millions of dollars on software to address this painful problem but often with not much success.

Enter social knowledge management. With social tools capturing elusive human expertise becomes a lot easier - a far cry from having to constantly update a database for example. Instead of having to make knowledge capturing an extra task, it happens automatically because discussions are being recorded as they happen. From knowledge capturing and management perspective this process where knowledge almost e�ortlessly gets turned into content is a big step forward. And when there is enough content like this in the network the search function makes it all discoverable.

Modern social solutions increasingly include peer review tools like voting which enable users to evaluate the quality of the information available. Onboarding new employees are facilitated. A good illustration on the evolution of knowledge management is Xerox and its tech reps. Xerox initially spent a lot of money to train their tech reps in classrooms, only to later realize that a collaborative social network with peer review capabilities is the most cost e�ective way to capture knowledge and train sta�.

Lower training costs by capturing silent knowledge


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_knowledge_management


http://www.slideshare.net/BusinessGoesSocial/xerox-story-working-out-loud

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Social collaboration is the future

Social collaborations tools in enterprise are not only a networking place, they help companies reach their business goals through a number of di�erent routes, making them quicker to react to changes in the external environment and more e�ective in using their most powerful assets.

As a consequence, social tools are becoming mainstream as an increasing number of companies adopt them. In the future, social collaboration will undoubtedly drive most organizations not as just another communication channel but as part of their nervous system.

The quicker your company starts the collaborative shift, the more ahead of competition it will be in today’s rapidly changing world.

Does anyone know? In the old days, �rms whose success was knowledge dependent such as consulting �rms or investment banks, encouraged group wide emails with does anyone know questions. The same questions were asked over and over as the answer would go to just one person. With social tools, this question would get a response from a knowledgeable network of experts that would become instant and searchable content, available to all at any future date through a search function.


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https://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/global/�les/nz__en_uk__telecom__gbe03121_usen_socialnetwork.pdf



http://nucleusresearch.com/press/social-crm-and-mobile-capabilities-boost-productivity-by-26-4-percent-nucleus-research-�nds/


https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/�les/form/anonymous/api/library/7761166c-b1c8-4afb-92ca-65bcf271caaa/docu

ment/�6390f6-a107-4b51-919d-56d231e78d24/media/patterns





http://www.soc.ucsb.edu/faculty/friedkin/Syllabi/Soc148/Granovetter%201983.pdf











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https://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/global/files/nz__en_uk__telecom__gbe03121_usen_socialnetwork.pdf











http://www.soc.ucsb.edu/faculty/friedkin/Syllabi/Soc148/Granovetter 1983.pdf










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WP Social Collaboration is the Future