Today's blog post comes to us from John Bruswick! This post is an abridged version of John’s white paper in which he discusses three principals to optimize social collaboration within an enterprise.
By
[email protected], Oracle Principal Sales Consultant
Effective social collaboration is actionable, deeply contextual and inherently derives its value from business entities outside of itself.
How does an organization begin the journey from traditional, siloed collaboration to natural, business entity based social collaboration?
Successful enablement of enterprise social collaboration requires that organizations embrace the following tenets and understand that traditional collaborative functionality has inherent limits - it is innovation and integration in accordance with the following tenets that will provide net-new efficiency benefits.
Key Tenets of Optimal Social Collaboration
Leverage a Ubiquitous Social Fabric - Collaborative activities should be supported through a ubiquitous social fabric, providing a personalized experience, broadcasting key business events and connecting people and business processes. This supports education of participants working in and around a specific business entity that will benefit from an implicit capture of tacit knowledge and provide continuity between participants. In the absence of this ubiquitous platform activities can still occur but are essentially siloed causing frequent duplication of effort across similar tasks, with critical tacit knowledge eluding capture.
Supply Continuous Context to Support Decision Making and Problem Solving - People generally engage in collaborative behavior to obtain a decision or the resolution for a specific issue. The time to achieve resolution is referred to as "Solve Time". Users have traditionally been forced to switch or "alt-tab" between business systems and synthesize their own context across disparate systems and processes. The constant loss of context forces end users to exert a large amount of effort that could be spent on higher value problem solving.
Extend the Collaborative Lifecycle into Back Office - Beyond the solve time from decision making efforts, additional time is expended formalizing the resolution that was generated from collaboration in a system of record. Extending collaboration to result in the capture of an explicit decision maximizes efficiencies, creating a closed circuit for a particular thread. This type of structured action may exist today within your organization's customer support system around opening, solving and closing support issues, but generally does not extend to Sales focused collaborative activities.
Excelling in the Unstructured Future
We will always have to deal with unstructured collaborative processes within our organizations. Regardless of the participants and nature of the collaborate process, two things are certain – the origination and end points are generally known and relate to a business entity, perhaps a customer, opportunity, order, shipping location, product or otherwise.
Imagine the benefits if an organization's key business systems supported a social fabric, provided continuous context and extended the lifecycle around the collaborative decision making to include output into back office systems of record.
The technical hurdle to embracing optimal social collaboration would fall away, leaving the company with an opportunity to focus on and refine how processes were approached. Time and resources previously required could then be reallocated to focusing on innovation to support competitive differentiation unique to your business.
How can you achieve optimal social collaboration? Oracle Social Network enables business users to collaborate with each other using a broad range of collaboration styles and integrates data from a variety of sources and business applications -- allowing you to achieve optimal social collaboration.
Looking to learn more? Read John's white paper, where he discusses in further detail the three principals to optimize social collaboration within an enterprise.
