IBM Software Thought Leadership Paper
Executive Guide: Harnessing the Power of Enterprise Social Collaboration Organizations can reap huge benefits by putting the right tools and culture in place. Here’s how.
September2015
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Executive Guide: Harnessing the Power of Enterprise Social Collaboration
Enterprise social collaboration has the potential to transform businesses, enabling new levels of speed and agility that can drive innovation and shift the dynamics of how people interact with each other and the organization. Social networking has been described as one of the four pillars of the next dominant computing platform, along with cloud computing, mobility and big data analytics. IDC says the combination of these technologies will account for nearly 50% of all IT spending by the end of the decade and virtually all IT spending growth.1 Organizations that have invested in enterprise social collaboration are already reaping significant benefits. Among IT and business leaders in those organizations, 72% say they have enhanced communication and collaboration; 67% have accelerated the speed at which they innovate, and 64% have entered new segments or markets, according to a survey of 1,447 executives conducted by the IBM Center for Applied Insights.2 But even the pioneers in using enterprise social collaboration realize that they have only begun to tap social’s vast potential to improve innovation and productivity. On the one hand, nearly three quarters of the respondents to the IBM survey said they believe a social business is one that uses social technologies to foster collaboration among customers, employees and partners; yet only 20% of respondents said their organizations have achieved this level of social interaction. The opportunity is at hand for IT and business leaders to put in place the technologies, tools and business processes to continue driving social collaboration. The willingness is there: Two thirds of the enterprises surveyed by IBM said they plan to increase their investment in social during the next two years.
However, for many organizations there is often no clear roadmap as to what specifically they can achieve through social collaboration, what it consists of and how to deploy it securely and successfully. This white paper describes the critical aspects required to successfully expand the use of social collaboration, while exploring how organizations can use IBM® Connections as a collaboration platform to ensure a successful and long-lasting transformation.
The Basics of Enterprise Social Collaboration Social collaboration is a lot more than tweeting or having a presence on Facebook. It is about using technology as a platform to empower people with tools to innovate, collaborate and apply insight in ways that have never before been available. It is also about creating a culture that supports and encourages these activities, ensuring that social collaboration best practices are embedded into business processes, and that the platforms that enable social collaboration are secure and agile. Building the right foundation for a successful social collaboration strategy starts with providing your employees, partners and others with the right tools to enable a wide range of activities that give them flexibility in how they can communicate and collaborate. These consist of: •
Social networking: This is a broad area, but there are two aspects of social networking your organization should focus on. These are: -- Innovation, such as using social networking platforms to openly generate and prioritize nontraditional ideas for new products and services in areas like research and development, product and service management, business strategy and operations transformation.
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Expertise and knowledge, which means using social networks to identify, create and spread critical information and real-time data. It also means being able to incorporate “expertise location” to quickly find the people with the right knowledge and skills to help solve a problem or participate in a collaborative process. The social collaboration platform should support advanced analytics engines to use this expertise and knowledge to arm employees with actionable insight that can drive competitive advantage and additional business opportunities.
Meetings: So that employees and business partners can collaborate without traveling, working face to face whenever they want, through online meetings with high-definition audio and video, as well as tools that enable them to share documents, applications and desktops. Chat: So that everyone—employees, partners, customers—can find the information they need, when they need it. This can be facilitated with tools such as enterprise instant messaging, online presence indicators and community collaboration for instant connection to the people behind the information.
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Documents: To accelerate productivity using tools that make it easy for teams to collaboratively create word processing, spreadsheet and presentation documents in real time.
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Content: By providing tools that engage people to collaborate as part of the content creation process. Workers should be able to control content through document check-in and check-out, version control,
approval routing, metadata, taxonomy, document types and nested folders. •
Email: Email is, of course, the foundation for most social collaboration activities, but it should not be taken for granted—email must, in fact, be tightly integrated into other social aspects of the program, and with all of your other important business applications. As just one example, you can quickly simplify collaboration among employees and partners by integrating email with calendar, contacts and file sharing.
Enhancing Social Collaboration Through the Cloud Beyond the basic tools you put in place to enable social collaboration, there are several other important aspects to consider. These are: •
Mobility: Mobile access is essential to social collaboration, so you need a platform that provides native mobile applications supporting a broad range of mobile devices and operating platforms.
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Enterprise integration: To maximize the value and impact of social collaboration, you need to integrate your social collaboration platform with your other critical business applications.
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Security: Employees, partners and customers have to have unflagging confidence that the social collaboration platforms they are using are secure and will protect against the loss of confidential data. Make sure the solution you use has robust security capabilities, facilitating compliance with standards such as SAS 70 Type II, SSAE 16, ISO 27001, Safe Harbor, HIPAA and other regulations.
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Executive Guide: Harnessing the Power of Enterprise Social Collaboration
Analytics: One of the promises of social collaboration is to be able to use information gathered from social activities to drive business innovation. Critical to that is the use of analytics to turn raw data into actionable insight that can improve customer support, enable personalized marketing initiatives and increase customer loyalty, among other benefits.
Putting all of this together requires a platform that not only supports a wide range of capabilities but is also open, flexible and agile. An important consideration is to use a social collaboration platform that gives you the opportunity for a cloud-based deployment. The capabilities of social collaboration touch every part of the organization, which helps to explain why 41% of the respondents to the IBM survey have deployed them in the cloud.3 By deploying social collaboration in the cloud, you can take advantage of cost savings, simplified scalability and management, and also easily roll out new initiatives and capabilities as they become available. Ideally, you can work with a vendor that gives you the flexibility to deploy in the cloud or on-premises, with seamless integration of features and capabilities across platforms.
2. A suite of products can and should provide unified, seamless interaction among the component parts. 3. A suite of products can and should provide the underlying security and analytics platforms that are essential to deriving the most business value out of your investment. In looking for a solutions provider, it is also important to consider a company that offers business services to help your organization plan and implement its strategy. Social collaboration is a relatively new concept for many businesses, and having a partner with deep knowledge and strategic consulting/implementation services can be a significant advantage in driving innovation and ensuring successful deployments.
While one aspect of enhancing social collaboration is cultural and process-oriented, it is also important to have the right technologies in place to support these new processes. This is where having a suite of tools and solutions is necessary because:
Within the emerging field of social collaboration, IBM has taken a strong leadership position, not only in helping to define the business value but also in providing the tools and technologies to help organizations succeed. An example is IBM Connections, a platform for social collaboration available through software-as-a-service (SaaS) on IBM Cloud, on-premises and hybrid deployment models. IBM has widespread recognition for this platform solution, from leading experts, such as Forrester,4 Gartner,5 IDC,6 Aragon Research7 and Ovum8 as a leading platform for enterprise social software. IBM Connections is a single platform with a suite of solutions for social networking, meetings, chat, documents, content and email, and it extends these capabilities with open application programming interfaces and a wide ecosystem of partners.
1. The right suite supports all of the basics of social collaboration described above.
IBM Connections also supports a broad range of mobile devices as well as native mobile applications. It incorporates
What to Look for in a Solution
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the latest security best practices—including authentication, intrusion prevention and physical security features—and supports analytics that can help organizations measure, understand and drive faster and more informed business decisions. In addition to having an integrated suite built on open APIs, ongoing development and a strong roadmap for future developments are critical to ensuring that organizations don’t get locked into a “dead end” platform. A commitment to continued innovation should be part of the consideration criteria. For example, IBM recently announced IBM Verse, mail reimagined for a more mobile and social world delivered from the cloud and supported by advanced analytics. By taking a fresh, design-inspired look at how social collaboration and mail can work together—not just how they work together now—IBM is proving its long-term commitment to enterprise social collaboration.
Taking the Next Step Enterprise social collaboration can have a positive impact on every aspect of an organization. It can drive improved customer satisfaction, higher levels of employee productivity, faster product and service development and a wealth of other benefits that many innovative companies are discovering as they expand deployments. For many organizations, the natural starting point to expand social collaboration is to put in place the right foundation of enabling tools and technologies. This approach allows organizations to integrate social collaboration as a process of incremental evolution. You can take a measured approach as you attempt to change the culture and learn how and where social collaboration can have the biggest impact on your organization.
The key, of course, is starting with the right foundation. This means a social collaboration platform that offers one of the broadest range of capabilities, along with support for mobility, state-of-the-art security and advanced business analytics. If you’re ready to learn more about how your organization can benefit from increased social collaboration, one way to start is by trying IBM Connections Cloud trial at no cost for 60 days.
For more information Are you ready to harness the power of enterprise social collaboration? Explore enterprise collaboration solutions from IBM. Learn more: Visit the IBM Connections page on IBM.com to learn more about how IBM can help: ibm.com/1hg3B71 1. Try IBM Connections Cloud for no charge for 60 days: ibm.com/1c1xxk7 2. Watch the latest webinar, which highlights how IBM Collaboration Solutions for mobile is key to your organization’s productivity, engagement and success: bit.ly/1Bzpkid 3. Join the IBM Social Business Collaboration conversation on Twitter at #IBM #SocBiz and follow @IBMCollabSol.
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References 1
“IDC Predictions 2014: Battles for Dominance —and Survival—on the 3rd Platform,” IDC, December 2013
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“Raising the game,” IBM Center for Applied Insights, August 2014
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“Charting the social universe,” IBM Center for Applied Insights, September 2014
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“The Forrester Wave: File Sync And Share Platforms, Q3 2013,” Forrester Research, July 10, 2013; “The Forrester Wave: Enterprise Social Platforms, Q2 2014,” Forrester Research, June 5, 2014
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“Magic Quadrant for Social Software in the Workplace,” Gartner, September 2014
Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
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“Worldwide Enterprise Social Networks 2014-2018 Forecast and 2013 Vendor Shares,” IDC, July 2014
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“The Aragon Research Globe™ for Social Software, 2014: Getting Down to Business,” Aragon Research, June 25, 2014
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“Ovum Decision Matrix: Selecting an Enterprise Social Networking Product, 2014,” Ovum, Jan. 30, 2014; “Ovum Decision Matrix: Selecting an Enterprise File Sync and Share Product, 2014-2015,” Ovum, Aug. 28, 2014
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