Is Social Collaboration Ready for You?

Fifteen years ago, we were working in a leading talent management software company. One reason it was a leading company was because the company encouraged innovation. Engineers and designers could log up to 20% of their time on their own ideas. Their pet projects could be individual or group projects, but they were not on the project road map and had no due dates.

A few of those efforts paid off in innovative (and well rewarded) leaps forward. Others were interesting ideas that influenced thinking in other areas. One or two were mere hints of things to come. One such hint was a widget for employees to show their mood on a smiley face slider. The theory was that if there were enough responses, it could be a barometer of the general employee mood.

The company tried deploying it, but it failed. Nobody used it. It was embedded in talent management applications most employees only used infrequently. It wasn’t a presence in their daily work lives. But that little widget was a precursor to employee engagement pulse surveys, just as Captain Kirk’s communicator presaged the Nokia flip phone.

Today, we thought of in another way. Looking at the current interest in social media as a business collaboration tool, we looked at the deployments of collaboration tools in talent management and other business platforms. We don’t see an indication of widespread adoption of software such as Salesforce Chatter in Workday, SumTotal Social Learning, SuccessFactors Jam, and Oracle Cloud Collaboration.

Tools embedded in applications used only by a part of the business will not achieve widespread adoption. If we can use a social tool to communicate only with people down the hall, we revert to email to work with everyone else Since we are on email all day, we use it for everything. The social tool goes unused.  

Social media in the enterprise, now know by the buzz phrase “Social Collaboration” is still a future concept.  We have not seen widespread adoption because users have not realized business value.

Offerings from Socialcast, Jabber and Slack may change all that. These services sit atop the company directory and operate independently of other business applications.

That may be the ticket to success. If we are to use a communication platform, it must be accessible on all our devices all the time. We already have that with email, so what social collaboration tools need to deliver is a more versatile and useful tool, always on and available everywhere.

Users who tap the floating Facebook Messenger icon on their tablets to chat with their social friends will want the same availability for business use. Until then, email will be the tool of choice.

Pixentia is a full-service technology company dedicated to helping clients solve business problems, improve the capability of their people, and achieve better results.