Jacob Morgan's Blog, page 40
August 2, 2013
Friday Vendor Roundup: Acquia, Mindjet, and Moxie Software
Every Friday I’m going to attempt to summarize any relevant news in the future of work/collaboration space. I’ll provide the name of the vendor, a short summary of what the announcement or piece of news is with a link to the original, and finally a short POV. I can’t cover every single thing that comes out but I will do my best to provide as much relevant content as I can. If you have something you think I should include then please send it over and I will decide if it’s something I can add. Again, keep in mind this is weekly roundup so the news or announcements need to be from that week. Here is the roundup for this week:
Acquia launches rescue program for Jive customers
Although it’s just a marketing campaign it’s still interesting. Acquia is going after Jive head on with this new campaign saying that Jive is too expensive, too hard to customize and integrate with other applications, and is just building more silos within organizations.
My POV
Personally I love the marketing approach, nothing wrong with a little competition especially since Jive’s CEO was recently quoted saying that Yammer was dead. Jive is certainly one of the more expensive vendors out there but theirmarket share is still growing. I know they are working hard on making the integration and customization process easier but to be honest this isn’t exactly easy for any vendor today. However, the advantage of Open Source is the massive community that can help innovate.
Mindjet launches a productivity gains calculator
In order to help organizations figure out how much money they waste by sitting in meetings and searching for information, Mindjet created a productivity gains calculator. The data from the calculator is based on survey data from over 5,000 business professionals over a three year period.
My POV
This certainly isn’t the first calculator of its kind but it’s still interesting to play around with and I like that they used actual employee survey data. You also have the ability to select what region you are from to get a more accurate dollar amount. It’s a nice marketing vehicle designed to help organizations realize why they need technologies like Mindjet.
Moxie Software bring on a new SVP of global field operations
Steve Yount who was previously the SVP at Workshare joined Moxie to run field operations. According to the announcement Steve’s role is going to be to help fuel growth for the company including sales through channel partners.
My POV
Apparently Steve also has a strong background in M&A and has been involved in a successful company IPO. I don’t think that Moxie is planning an IPO but perhaps they can be a good acquisition target for a larger organization which I think is a direction they are certainly exploring.
July 29, 2013
Do or Do Not, There is No Try
The title of this post comes from a quote from Yoda, the famous Star Wars characters. Who would have thought that many years later this quote would be so applicable to organizations seeking to become more collaborative. This quote was actually used by one of our clients during an internal presentation to her executive team in order to drum up support and I loved that she included it! I have spent the past few weeks or so, speaking with organizations who say they want to become more collaborative and are concerned with the future of work. These same organizations have been stuck in the same place for over a year now, making little progress in their efforts. That’s because it seems as though many are caught with having one foot moving forward and the other moving backward. In other words, they have commitment issues.
One of the frustrating and unfortunate things that I see companies doing is getting started with something only to stop a few months later and then resuming again a few months after that. It’s like trying watch a very scratched DVD that keeps jerking and skipping around. Business leaders need to look at collaboration and the future of work as a marriage, they either commit to it or they don’t. Commitment doesn’t just mean saying “I do” either, it means acting on that “I do” as well. This means giving it 110% from the get-go and not starting small and “seeing what happens.” At this point there should be no doubt in the minds of any business leader at any company in the world that the way we work is changing and evolving and that organizations needs to adapt. Anyone that is seriously doubting the reality of this will end up looking for a job soon…
It’s easy to spend years researching, learning, and educating without actually doing. In fact things can change so quickly that by the time you are done “planning” the landscape will be unrecognizable. I can’t emphasize this enough, organizations that aren’t committed won’t succeed. As the wise Yoda once said…
Do or Do Not, There is No Try
The title of this post comes from a quote from Yoda, the famous Star Wars characters. Who would have thought that many years later this quote would be so applicable to organizations seeking to become more collaborative. This quote was actually used by one of our clients during an internal presentation to her executive team in order to drum up support and I loved that she included it! I have spent the past few weeks or so, speaking with organizations who say they want to become more collaborative and are concerned with the future of work. These same organizations have been stuck in the same place for over a year now, making little progress in their efforts. That’s because it seems as though many are caught with having one foot moving forward and the other moving backward. In other words, they have commitment issues.
One of the frustrating and unfortunate things that I see companies doing is getting started with something only to stop a few months later and then resuming again a few months after that. It’s like trying watch a very scratched DVD that keeps jerking and skipping around. Business leaders need to look at collaboration and the future of work as a marriage, they either commit to it or they don’t. Commitment doesn’t just mean saying “I do” either, it means acting on that “I do” as well. This means giving it 110% from the get-go and not starting small and “seeing what happens.” At this point there should be no doubt in the minds of any business leader at any company in the world that the way we work is changing and evolving and that organizations needs to adapt. Anyone that is seriously doubting the reality of this will end up looking for a job soon…
It’s easy to spend years researching, learning, and educating without actually doing. In fact things can change so quickly that by the time you are done “planning” the landscape will be unrecognizable. I can’t emphasize this enough, organizations that aren’t committed won’t succeed. As the wise Yoda once said…
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July 26, 2013
Friday Vendor Roundup: MangoApps, Yammer, Salesforce Chatter, and Clarizen
Every Friday I’m going to attempt to summarize any relevant news in the future of work/collaboration space. I’ll provide the name of the vendor, a short summary of what the announcement or piece of news is with a link to the original, and finally a short POV. I can’t cover every single thing that comes out but I will do my best to provide as much relevant content as I can. If you have something you think I should include then please send it over and I will decide if it’s something I can add. Again, keep in mind this is weekly roundup so the news or announcements need to be from that week. Here is the roundup for this week:
Mango Apps 8.1 release
I actually meant to cover this when it was first announced and forgot so I’m adding it here. The new version of the platform adds things such as a native Windows desktop client, HTML 5 document viewer, screen capture, Google Analytics integration, and much more. They also launched a product called TinyTake which is a free screen capture and annotation tool that anyone can use..
My POV
I’m a big fan of MangoApps and believe they have a terrific product. They are a privately held company and so their marketing budget is small but their product is powerful which is why you may not have heard about them. I’ve talked to executive team around their roadmap and they have exciting things coming up in the near future. They focus more on mid-size organizations but also have some enterprise size customers. Their product rivals what many of the more known vendors are offering.
Disclosure: We use a review (no cost) instance of MangoApps and have been for a while now
Yammer adds browser extension
Yammer has added an effective way for employees to share external information internally with their new browser extension. This allows employees to push a button to share an article or web-page internally with their teams and also allows them to see if any conversations around that page are already happening.
My POV
A great addition to what is becoming a powerful Yammer arsenal. While the extension might not be a critical component it is certainly a nice to have feature for employees who are looking to start conversations around a particular topic. I’m sure community managers using Yammer are collectively saying “thank you.”
Salesforce Chatter updates mobile functionality
The goal of the new mobile update is to support pretty much any action that an employee needs to take on the platform. Traditionally most mobile apps that enterprise collaboration vendors have are either view only or provide limited functionality. However, the new mobile version of Chatter will allow employees to take actions such as editing customer records or marketing campaigns. The app will also for custom actions such as one click access to submit a help request or travel reimbursement (or anything else that the company can think of). Finally, the app will provided updated analytics dashboards in real time.
My POV
The entire point of this update is to empower the mobile employee. As mentioned above most mobile versions of platforms typically provide limited functionality which means that employees on the go can’t be as effective or productive as they are when in front of a computer. This new update is bring the idea of the completely mobile employee one step closer to reality. The fact the analytics dashboards are also updated in real time based on actions that employees make on their mobile devices also allows for employees to make critical business decisions while on the go. Great move from Salesforce.
Clarizen announces record number of customers
Clarizen just announced they broke the 2,000 customer mark spanning organizations across 75 countries.
My POV
Clarizen is one of those platforms that is sneaking up from behind on many of the “known” enterprise collaboration vendors. They have a superb project management platform and are working on adding additional collaboration capabilities in the near future. Their company is actually larger than most people think and it’s growing fast. Definitely a vendor to watch going forward. They have made some other announcements as well which you can read in the link below.
Disclosure: Clarizen is a client
July 25, 2013
Friday Vendor Roundup: MangoApps, Yammer, Salesforce Chatter, and Clarizen
Every Friday I’m going to attempt to summarize any relevant news in the future of work/collaboration space. I’ll provide the name of the vendor, a short summary of what the announcement or piece of news is with a link to the original, and finally a short POV. I can’t cover every single thing that comes out but I will do my best to provide as much relevant content as I can. If you have something you think I should include then please send it over and I will decide if it’s something I can add. Again, keep in mind this is weekly roundup so the news or announcements need to be from that week. Here is the roundup for this week:
Mango Apps 8.1 release
I actually meant to cover this when it was first announced and forgot so I’m adding it here. The new version of the platform adds things such as a native Windows desktop client, HTML 5 document viewer, screen capture, Google Analytics integration, and much more. They also launched a product called TinyTake which is a free screen capture and annotation tool that anyone can use..
My POV
I’m a big fan of MangoApps and believe they have a terrific product. They are a privately held company and so their marketing budget is small but their product is powerful which is why you may not have heard about them. I’ve talked to executive team around their roadmap and they have exciting things coming up in the near future. They focus more on mid-size organizations but also have some enterprise size customers. Their product rivals what many of the more known vendors are offering.
Disclosure: We use a review (no cost) instance of MangoApps and have been for a while now
Yammer adds browser extension
Yammer has added an effective way for employees to share external information internally with their new browser extension. This allows employees to push a button to share an article or web-page internally with their teams and also allows them to see if any conversations around that page are already happening.
My POV
A great addition to what is becoming a powerful Yammer arsenal. While the extension might not be a critical component it is certainly a nice to have feature for employees who are looking to start conversations around a particular topic. I’m sure community managers using Yammer are collectively saying “thank you.”
Salesforce Chatter updates mobile functionality
The goal of the new mobile update is to support pretty much any action that an employee needs to take on the platform. Traditionally most mobile apps that enterprise collaboration vendors have are either view only or provide limited functionality. However, the new mobile version of Chatter will allow employees to take actions such as editing customer records or marketing campaigns. The app will also for custom actions such as one click access to submit a help request or travel reimbursement (or anything else that the company can think of). Finally, the app will provided updated analytics dashboards in real time.
My POV
The entire point of this update is to empower the mobile employee. As mentioned above most mobile versions of platforms typically provide limited functionality which means that employees on the go can’t be as effective or productive as they are when in front of a computer. This new update is bring the idea of the completely mobile employee one step closer to reality. The fact the analytics dashboards are also updated in real time based on actions that employees make on their mobile devices also allows for employees to make critical business decisions while on the go. Great move from Salesforce.
Clarizen announces record number of customers
Clarizen just announced they broke the 2,000 customer mark spanning organizations across 75 countries.
My POV
Clarizen is one of those platforms that is sneaking up from behind on many of the “known” enterprise collaboration vendors. They have a superb project management platform and are working on adding additional collaboration capabilities in the near future. Their company is actually larger than most people think and it’s growing fast. Definitely a vendor to watch going forward. They have made some other announcements as well which you can read in the link below.
Disclosure: Clarizen is a client
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July 22, 2013
The Feature Adoption Framework for Social Collaboration
One of the things that organizations need to consider when rolling out a social collaboration platform is how various features will impact or affect adoption. Most platforms today have dozens of features but should organizations roll them out all at once? That can certainly be one approach. But another approach which I find to be more effective is to roll out the features gradually based on their value and how they can help improve employee adoption. In fact, looking at adoption from a technology or features perspective is something that is not typically explored, but should be. This framework can help organizations understand how features can impact adoption. This is one of the many topics I explore in my book, The Collaborative Organization.
Let’s walk through each stage in detail.
Stage 1- Initial Features
Implement basic and intuitive features that can help solve problems right out of the gate. Rich profiles and microblogs are a great starting point, along with the ability to share files and search for information. Enabling single sign-on functionality is also crucial to implement early on as it can be a huge factor in ramping up early adoption and solves a very clear and immediate need in most organizations. Depending on the size of your organization, you may be in this stage for one to six months. Instead of basing this on a timeline, look at employee use and feedback as an indicator for when to advance.
Value
Employees will start being able to find and connect with their colleagues at work through the use of rich profiles. They will also be able to share ideas and content and ask and answer questions via the microblogging functionality. Instead of relying on e-mail as the content repository, employees will be able to share files with one another easily. They will no longer have to sign on to multiple platforms to access information; they will only need to log into one system that can authenticate them across all other systems. Executives will start to gain insight into how employees work and how the organization as a whole functions. The organization also will start to see the serendipity effect emerge.
Stage 2- Additional Features
Once employees become more comfortable with and accustomed to the initial set of features, you can begin to turn on additional capabilities. Project and task management features should be added as well as group and workspace creation capabilities, shared calendaring, and collaborative file creation, storage, and sharing (among others). These features will help employees add more context to the way they work while providing them with the additional tools they need to solve business problems. Organizations are typically in this stage for around three months.
Value
Employees will be able to manage more of their day-to-day work lives on the emergent (or social) collaboration platform. Tasks can be created and assigned, and special project groups or department groups can be created to keep everyone on the same page. It also becomes much easier for employees to retrieve and share information with one another. Adoption will increase as employees will need to access the collaboration platform to get the information required to get their jobs done. Employees will also start to see a reduction in duplicate content as well as improved communication. A “single source of truth” for projects and information begins to be formed here. At this stage colleagues also typically begin to influence one another to collaborate. Finally, executives gain greater insight into their organizations.
Stage 3-Systems Integration
Once the set of features and capabilities is rolled out, integration can begin with other legacy and back-end systems such as customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), billing and invoicing, and ticketing systems. All required and relevant integrations are rolled out here as well as any remaining features the organization wishes to roll out. Organizations typically are in this phase for 6 to 18 months or more.
Value
The emergent collaboration platform now becomes the front door for the enterprise, and everything employees need to get their jobs done is found in one place. Adoption increases even further as employees no longer need to access other applications or sites and can instead utilize one platform to get everything done. Process improvement is very noticeable here. Context around collaboration becomes prevalent, and communication becomes increasingly horizontal rather than vertical. Executives now have a very solid understanding of what is happening in their organizations at the ground level.
Stage 4- Best Practices and Ideation
The final stage involves employee ideation and innovation and the creation of best practices. Here we see employees being able to contribute their ideas and feedback to help shape the future of collaboration in the enterprise. New ideas, use cases, and opportunities are identified and pursued. Best practices are developed regularly to address issues or recommendations for how employees can best leverage the emergent collaboration solution. This isn’t to say that best practices and ideation can’t and won’t take shape in earlier stages, but this is when it really starts to become formalized and distributed. Some organizations put a heavy emphasis on developing best practices and including employee ideation concurrently with earlier stages, which of course is another option. Organizations typically remain in this stage once the other three are completed, but they can regress, for example, if a deployed platform is being replaced for another one or if the organization feels that new features were rolled out too quickly.
Value
Through the use of best practices successes can be replicated and failures can be minimized. Employees are now able to share and access a resource base to help educate, train, and guide new and existing employees to make the most of emergent collaboration. Employees are able to contribute their own ideas and provide feedback to help shape the future of collaboration and work at the organization. Emergent collaboration becomes the standard for how work gets done. I also don’t want to suggest that this is the only phase where employee feedback should be considered; that should be ongoing through all the phases of deployment.
Keep in mind that this is one framework you can use but that it can be adapted. For example, instead of having two feature stages, your organization might have three. This needs to be mapped to what works best for your organization.
Finally, getting and sustaining desired adoption levels does take time. Nobody likes to hear that things take time, but that’s the reality, especially in large organizations. Successful emergent collaboration initiatives aren’t looked at as projects or campaigns; they are looked at as an evolution of doing business. Smart organizations understand that this is how things need to be done in the future. Can you imagine your organization not deploying these tools in the next three to five years?
July 21, 2013
The Feature Adoption Framework for Social Collaboration
One of the things that organizations need to consider when rolling out a social collaboration platform is how various features will impact or affect adoption. Most platforms today have dozens of features but should organizations roll them out all at once? That can certainly be one approach. But another approach which I find to be more effective is to roll out the features gradually based on their value and how they can help improve employee adoption. In fact, looking at adoption from a technology or features perspective is something that is not typically explored, but should be. This framework can help organizations understand how features can impact adoption. This is one of the many topics I explore in my book, The Collaborative Organization.
Let’s walk through each stage in detail.
Stage 1- Initial Features
Implement basic and intuitive features that can help solve problems right out of the gate. Rich profiles and microblogs are a great starting point, along with the ability to share files and search for information. Enabling single sign-on functionality is also crucial to implement early on as it can be a huge factor in ramping up early adoption and solves a very clear and immediate need in most organizations. Depending on the size of your organization, you may be in this stage for one to six months. Instead of basing this on a timeline, look at employee use and feedback as an indicator for when to advance.
Value
Employees will start being able to find and connect with their colleagues at work through the use of rich profiles. They will also be able to share ideas and content and ask and answer questions via the microblogging functionality. Instead of relying on e-mail as the content repository, employees will be able to share files with one another easily. They will no longer have to sign on to multiple platforms to access information; they will only need to log into one system that can authenticate them across all other systems. Executives will start to gain insight into how employees work and how the organization as a whole functions. The organization also will start to see the serendipity effect emerge.
Stage 2- Additional Features
Once employees become more comfortable with and accustomed to the initial set of features, you can begin to turn on additional capabilities. Project and task management features should be added as well as group and workspace creation capabilities, shared calendaring, and collaborative file creation, storage, and sharing (among others). These features will help employees add more context to the way they work while providing them with the additional tools they need to solve business problems. Organizations are typically in this stage for around three months.
Value
Employees will be able to manage more of their day-to-day work lives on the emergent (or social) collaboration platform. Tasks can be created and assigned, and special project groups or department groups can be created to keep everyone on the same page. It also becomes much easier for employees to retrieve and share information with one another. Adoption will increase as employees will need to access the collaboration platform to get the information required to get their jobs done. Employees will also start to see a reduction in duplicate content as well as improved communication. A “single source of truth” for projects and information begins to be formed here. At this stage colleagues also typically begin to influence one another to collaborate. Finally, executives gain greater insight into their organizations.
Stage 3-Systems Integration
Once the set of features and capabilities is rolled out, integration can begin with other legacy and back-end systems such as customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), billing and invoicing, and ticketing systems. All required and relevant integrations are rolled out here as well as any remaining features the organization wishes to roll out. Organizations typically are in this phase for 6 to 18 months or more.
Value
The emergent collaboration platform now becomes the front door for the enterprise, and everything employees need to get their jobs done is found in one place. Adoption increases even further as employees no longer need to access other applications or sites and can instead utilize one platform to get everything done. Process improvement is very noticeable here. Context around collaboration becomes prevalent, and communication becomes increasingly horizontal rather than vertical. Executives now have a very solid understanding of what is happening in their organizations at the ground level.
Stage 4- Best Practices and Ideation
The final stage involves employee ideation and innovation and the creation of best practices. Here we see employees being able to contribute their ideas and feedback to help shape the future of collaboration in the enterprise. New ideas, use cases, and opportunities are identified and pursued. Best practices are developed regularly to address issues or recommendations for how employees can best leverage the emergent collaboration solution. This isn’t to say that best practices and ideation can’t and won’t take shape in earlier stages, but this is when it really starts to become formalized and distributed. Some organizations put a heavy emphasis on developing best practices and including employee ideation concurrently with earlier stages, which of course is another option. Organizations typically remain in this stage once the other three are completed, but they can regress, for example, if a deployed platform is being replaced for another one or if the organization feels that new features were rolled out too quickly.
Value
Through the use of best practices successes can be replicated and failures can be minimized. Employees are now able to share and access a resource base to help educate, train, and guide new and existing employees to make the most of emergent collaboration. Employees are able to contribute their own ideas and provide feedback to help shape the future of collaboration and work at the organization. Emergent collaboration becomes the standard for how work gets done. I also don’t want to suggest that this is the only phase where employee feedback should be considered; that should be ongoing through all the phases of deployment.
Keep in mind that this is one framework you can use but that it can be adapted. For example, instead of having two feature stages, your organization might have three. This needs to be mapped to what works best for your organization.
Finally, getting and sustaining desired adoption levels does take time. Nobody likes to hear that things take time, but that’s the reality, especially in large organizations. Successful emergent collaboration initiatives aren’t looked at as projects or campaigns; they are looked at as an evolution of doing business. Smart organizations understand that this is how things need to be done in the future. Can you imagine your organization not deploying these tools in the next three to five years?
Send to Kindle
July 19, 2013
Friday Vendor Roundup: Telligent, Jive, and Ping Identity
Every Friday I’m going to attempt to summarize any relevant news in the future of work/collaboration space. I’ll provide the name of the vendor, a short summary of what the announcement or piece of news is with a link to the original, and finally a short POV. I can’t cover every single thing that comes out but I will do my best to provide as much relevant content as I can. If you have something you think I should include then please send it over and I will decide if it’s something I can add. Again, keep in mind this is weekly roundup so the news or announcements need to be from that week. Here is the roundup for this week
Telligent acquires Zimbra from VMware
Zimbra which used to be a part of VMware was acquired by Telligent which will actually re-brand as Zimbra…Telligent will be no more. While Telligent focused on many of the social aspects of collaboration Zimbra has a core feature set around more traditional means of collaboration such as task management, email, shared calendaring, and file sharing. However, Telligent did have some of these features built into its existing platform. This acquisition also means 100 new employees as well as existing Zimbra customers will be carried over to the new company.
My POV
To be honest I haven’t paid too much attention to Zimbra in the past and VMware doesn’t seem to really care that they are getting rid of it; they have their own product focused on social collaboration called Socialcast. Overall it looks like a good move for both companies VMware seems to have peaked with their use and need for Zimbra and Telligent is just getting started with it. The Telligent brand will disappear and everything will become Zimbra which I found to be an interesting choice but not a bad thing. This acquisition doubles the size of employees and increases the number of customers and partners which is always a good thing. This will provide a great opportunity to up-sell and cross-sell Telligent and Zimbra customers which means more revenue. It will be interesting to see how the re-branding and the integration works out.
New Jive summer cloud release
Jive just released the newest version of their product which includes an advanced gamification module powered by Bunchball, improved analytics, and added integrations with Chatter, Yammer, and Evernote through their acquisition of Streamonce.
My POV
When you drill down into the new version of the product a little bit you find that the recent changes are actually quite interesting. For example managers an now create custom missions and rewards based on customized actions and paths that employees take on the platform. This is all designed to help improve employee engagement and productivity. The recent Streamonce integrations also mean that organizations who are using multiple platforms such as Jive, Yammer, and Chatter can now see activity and collaborate across multiple platforms without any additional coding. Most organizations are typically using several platforms at once which are all oftentimes cobbled together with custom integrations and additional coding. This new integration focused on configuration not coding which is a big deal. Jive is certainly making the right moves to stay on top of the enterprise collaboration market.
Ping Identity raised an additional 44 million in funding
Ping Identity offers single-sign-on and identity management technology to over 1,000 corporate clients. The company is getting ready to IPO in 2014 and will be using the recent round of funding to focus on international expansion.
My POV
As organizations shift their IT infrastructure to the cloud, allow for flexible work environments, and BYOD; identity management is going to be an even more crucial role for organizations. I think there is a massive opportunity for a company such as Ping Identity to become the standard for identity management and single-sign-on. In a few years every large organization is going to need what Ping Identity is offering. I’m sure that in addition to the continued growth of the company we can see some upcoming acquisitions and I’m excited to see what the next two years will hold for them.
See you next week!
July 18, 2013
Four Things Employees Can Do to Align Their Teams and Satisfy Their Boss
Nobody likes to be micro-managed yet managers always want to know what employees are working and employees feel a lot of pressure to always have to justify where their time is going. In larger size organizations especially, a lot of an employee’s time can be spent just looking for stuff. I’ve spoken to a few employees at large organizations who experience tension between their teams because everyone always wants to know what everyone else is working on. Another big challenge for employees is keeping their teams aligned which is crucial considering today’s modern distributed workforce.
These are two of the many areas where a collaboration platform can prove to be a most useful solution. There are a few things employees can do to to keep their teams aligned and their bosses satisfied:
Narrate your work
Leverage the technology to not only share what you are working on but what you thinking about. This allows your team to see where your thought process is taking you and allows them to comment and share their ideas and feedback. Not only that but if your manager wants to know what you are working on they can simply take a look at your updates. Problem solved.
Ask and answer questions
Finding people and information inside of many companies can be a very tedious task. So why not rely on the collective intelligence of your organization to help you? You can ask for documents you are looking for, advice on a project, or who you should be speaking with about a current engagement. Answering questions also helps establish your presence within the organization as a leader, something which was not possible before.
Create groups
Perhaps one of the most effective ways to keep alignment within your team and organization is by creating groups where you can share all the relevant files and information with the right people. Let’s say you are working on a particular client engagement or reside within a certain department within your company. You can leverage groups to make sure that the right people are getting access to the right files at the right time. No more emailing, no more going back and forth. Everyone can see what is going on what everyone is working on and the beauty is that nobody needs to bug anybody else. Perhaps one of the best benefits of this is the reduction in reliance on meetings. If everyone can stay up to date on what’s happening then that means less meeting time.
Co-create content
Instead of sending emails back and forth with documents and revisions employees can co-author documents which means one document that everyone can create, edit, and comment on. Collaboration platforms provide easy versioning and sharing controls to make sure that the right people are involved and reliance on email is dramatically reduced.
It’s in the best interest of employees to use collaboration platforms in their day-to-day jobs to help keep their teams aligned and their bosses at ease. The next time your boss asks you “what did you do today?” you tell them to go check the collaboration environment where they can see everything you were working on. Problem solved.
July 15, 2013
The New Standard for Evaluating Enterprise Software is How Consumer Grade It Is
It’s no secret that much of modern day enterprise software (specifically around collaboration) is being modeled around consumer web software; and there’s good reason for that. When we think of platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, or (insert company here), we associate them with things such as ease of use, access on any device, connecting with and finding people and information, building communities, and engagement (and I’m sure many other things). But, when we think of enterprise software those are pretty much the exact opposite things we think about. If you look at pretty much any piece of social/enterprise collaboration software today you will notice two things; virtually all of them look alike and do similar things; and they all have features and functionality taken from the platforms we use in our personal lives aka social media, aka the consumer web.
Enterprise software is starting to be evaluated based on how “consumer grade” it is and this is a big shift; how often do you hear an executive say something like “can it do hashtags like Twitter?” or “can you create groups like in Facebook?” Traditionally there has always been this big rift between consumer software and enterprise software and now the two are starting to blur quite closely. Sure, there are still some differences in a few areas such as use cases but for the most part they are converging. Many business leaders want to have enterprise software that can do the same things that consumer software can do (and of course go beyond that). After all, if it’s so easy for us to find and access people and information on any device on the consumer web shouldn’t we expect just as much, if not more, within our organizations?
Collaboration vendors which offer cloud-based offerings are making this that much easier. For the most part it’s just as easy to set up a new Facebook page as it is to set up a collaboration environment for your team and this is pretty amazing; what’s just as amazing is that anyone in your company do it…anyone. This poses an interesting challenge for many CIOs who used to have enterprise on lock-down, meaning nothing happened unless they said it happened. But, that’s a topic for an upcoming post!
So what does this mean?
For the first time there’s going to be this give and take between enterprise software and consumer software. Right now consumer software is the front runner which is spurring innovation ideas for the enterprise but eventually this will change and the enterprise will start to develop very specific use case or scenarios which may then be relevant for new innovation in the consumer web. We already see this for example in the financial space where companies are adding compliance functionality on top of enterprise collaboration platforms. It’s a bit of a see-saw effect. Twitter, Facebook, Klout, Foursquare, Wikis, Blogs, and many other pieces of consumer software are now the standard for enterprise software.
This also means that it is still important to not just focus on enterprise software but to also pay attention to what is happening on the consumer side of things because at least for now, that is where many enterprise software ideas are coming from. However, what’s also particularly interesting is how enterprise software vendors are able to take ideas from the consumer web and improve upon them; adding additional features and functionality.
Personally, I still think we are near the early stages of innovation for enterprise software. The seesaw has only moved in one direction and there are many more moves still to come. But one things is clear, the standard for evaluting enterprise software is how consumer grade it is.
