Collaboration: We’ve been doing it the hard way
Collaboration is simply a series of conversations to get to a goal. It involves connecting people, asking questions, collecting answers and ideas, surfacing new information, getting feedback on interim deliverables, and the like. It is social. It involves connecting and sharing. It is the way most work gets done.
The most popular form of collaboration today is email with attachment, flying around. Most people don’t realise that archived or left-over emails are mostly seldom referred to, giving rise to wastage of storage and reduce emailing efficiency.
Corporate employees spend up to 1 day a week looking for information, according to research firm IDC. The cost of this unproductive time can be as much as 25% of your staff costs. And according to an IBM study of 400 human resources executives, only 13% of people can find someone with a particular area of expertise in their own company.
Enterprise social software: 5 requirements for success
#1: It creates a sharing culture
1.1) Microblogging network – allow employees to connect to such facility to allow sharing of thoughts and ideas.
1.2) Social networking – allow employees to interact using social network tools to be in-tuned with being socialised.
1.3) Acknowledge contributors – contributors must be acknowledged with photos, contacts and history.
1.4) Keep up to date – stay in touch with updates all the time.
1.5) Consult others who may have the knowledge – being able to search from existing information such as tags to discover information that is required.
1.6) Learn from others – learn how people approach situations, how they prioritize and make decisions.
#2: You have absolute confidence in its adoption rate
2.1) Adoption is a must – everybody must embrace it, no one is exempted from not using it.
2.2) It must be very easy to use in the beginning and powerful enough in the first launch.
2.3) It must attract people to want to use it automatically.
2.4) Users must be in control to certain extend.
2.5) The solution should be something which have gained good reviews and ratings.
#3: It fits the way people work
3.1) Email integration.
3.2) Support mobile devices.
3.3) Offline access.
3.4) Integrate with 3rd party applications.
#4: It aggregates information from all sources
4.1) Configurable settings for permission – allow public workspaces to be visible to all while other restricted workspaces to be visible to selected people.
4.2) Able to pull information from other applications and external sources such as search engines.
#5: It has a low Total Cost of Ownership
5.1) SaaS is a good choice.
Conclusion
Socialtext recommends SaaS solutions.
