Social Tools Yield Results: Enterprise 2.0

Bangalore: Organizations which are using social tools inside and outside their enterprise have proven to show tangible gains from the use social initiatives says a report recently published, it also illuminates how these enterprises are benefited by these social tool and what results they’re seeing.

The report ‘When Social Meets Business Real Work Gets Done’ written by an MIT Professor Andrew McAffe reveals the results of an AIIM study that observed the growth of social business technologies in organizations which have 10 to over 5,000 employees, that ranged across three areas; sales and marketing collaboration, open innovation and enterprise Q&A reports Michael Ansaldo in pcworld.com

"All three areas addressed by the Task Force demonstrate that when people engage properly with each other and with technology, trust, self-organization, and good business results emerge," McAfee said in a press release. "The three use cases are true examples of social business because they depend on people with strong, weak and potential ties to organize their own workflows, roles and credentials" he added.

The key points of the reports in the following three areas were

Enterprise Q&A (EQ7A) : It is the ability to ask questions at large – to an unknown and unspecified audience – without having to guess in advance who might be able to answer them the report showed that 40percent of survey respondents underappreciated EQ&A whereas 45percent  of respondents say that they are either extremely or  moderately satisfied with this. On the other hand organizations that offer rewards for EQ&A participation the percentage rose to 60

Open Innovation (OI): is the process of tapping into the wisdom of crowds to help solve problems and formulate new offerings.48 percent of respondents engaging in OI report that it has already yielded major changes to internal processes, and 34% report major changes to their external offerings concluding that OI appears to be powerful and success.

Sales and Marketing Integration: Many believe that collaboration of sales and marketing is problematic. These two functions need to work closely together, yet often don’t share information or keep each other in the loop. The use of Enterprise 2.0 tools to improve collaboration between sales and marketing was the least adopted initiative in the study. But of those respondents who are actively pursuing it, 60% reported significant gains in knowledge sharing and communication.

"We are clearly moving into a new phase in social technologies, one in which the critical success factor will be the integration of social technologies into key organizational processes," said AIIM President, John Mancini. "The end objective should not be to simply set up social networks inside our organizations, but to actually make our organizations social. There is still a lot of work to be done to fulfill this potential, but the three use cases suggest that significant progress is happening inside business" said Mancini.