ON A CAVALIER SATURDAY EVENING, a month ago, Yogesh Bansal, the Founder and CEO of Apnacircle.com, was set to retire early to his bed, till he received a call from his business associate, informing him about the integration of the web platform of ApnaCircle, a community for professionals, with a world-renowned social networking site.

Well, this was the news for which he and his team had waited for long. “Wow! This is something that merits to be shared instantly with my team who worked day in and out to make this happen,”  exclaimed a charged up Bansal. He unfolded his laptop to log in to his customised enterprise blog.

“Great news guys, your efforts and hard work have paid off. We have managed to partner with a world-renowned company, on which we have been working for so long. Congratulations!” he wrote.To his amazement, in less than an hour, a series of congratulatory messages, discussing ways to promote this achievement among the web platform users, started pouring in.

Bansal was not sure if he could receive a similar reception from his partners or employees, on a casual weekend, had the same message been communicated through an e-mail, or any other channel.

“Connecting via new-age tools is inarguably the best interactive approach, which makes a long-lasting impression in modern day communication,” Bansal notes, while recalling the moment.

No wonder then, even before the week started, a plan was in place to promote a new idea, developed in a fun-driven, participative environment, without giving any serious trouble to the team. And, that’s how the modern day communication should function—if one needs to outsmart competitors and gain first-mover advantage.

Changing perceptions

When compared to 1.0 communication channels (read e-mails and shared folders), industry experts today are convinced that applying real-time collaboration tools is the only way to increasing productivity—instantly.

And, it is a major method to encourage positive participation from employees, stakeholders and partners.

“Use of collaborative tools can help organisations circulate the information of ongoing process and projects, that too, with complete transparency. It fosters the evolution of concepts and inferences, as a wide spectrum of people are involved,” says Jacob Livingstone, Manager-IT, BEC.

One can evaluate its utility by way of ideation events and solutions received for a specific problem, or work products being delivered using such tools.
What’s more, groups can be built for opportunities, that work in parallel, which may result in shortening of delivery timelines. This becomes increasingly important for any organisation, that is geographically spread out.

Let’s take an example of a company like Persistent that encourages its employees to be a part of the networking platforms and tools to connect with their customers, counterparts, professional group members, open source communities and former colleagues.

Commenting on the importance of customised collaboration tools over social media platforms, Swapnil Paranjpe, Senior Project Manager–Enterprise Collaboration BU, Persistent Systems, says, “Enterprise collaboration tools are centred around attaining collective intelligence and staff collaboration at the organisation level, or with partners. These include features such as staff networking, expert recommendations, information sharing, expertise location, peer feedback, and real-time collaboration. At the personal level, this enables employees to enhance social awareness and their profiles and interactions.”

For Tulip Telecom, the important lesson, while adopting the new media for partners and employees, was that social media marketing is not just about creating an account and sitting on it.You need something extra to make it effective, rather than just hoping for customers to come looking for you.

The company has an in-house social engagement platform for employees named Tulip Café where employees are free to share, create groups, get into active discussions and share presentations. “On a daily basis, in fact sometimes at hourly intervals, there needs to be something relevant the platform should offer to its audience,” says Sujoy Mukherjee, AGM, Marketing–Tulip Telecom.A couple of years ago, the company started an open-platform enterprise networking tool called Grey Gambit to develop a link with its customers—the IT leaders.

“Recently, we had 1,200 and more members with us. We managed to rope in encouraging participation in all sorts of activities,” says Gaurava Yadav, Project Manager for Grey Gambit

Making the right connections
Since microblogging is a modest expense (often as low as US$1 per user, per month), there is no need for elaborate RoI studies—prior to piloting the service.
However, experts believe, it’s critical to identify “key business goals” that an organisation wishes to achieve, before deploying a solution. A thorough brainstorming—as far as employee feedback is concerned—can be of great use to the organisation.

“Time has come to adopt smart practices that not only help businesses to reduce expenses, but also provide them practical ways of collaboration and communication,” says Karthik Padmanabhan, Country Manager–Lotus Software, IBM India (South Asia).

“We have implemented ideas, sold products and services and changed business processes through collaboration,” stresses Manish Mehta, VP, Global Online at Dell.
The company uses microblogging services, such as Yammer, to foster sharing among employees, as well as to share critical events within the organisation. “Yammer also integrates with the e-mail and can be used to share documents and links between employees,” Mehta adds.

Data theft & misuse; ignorance can be fatal
The business world is still in the early stages of adopting social networking technologies. But, the future is alive with possibilities.
As different collaborative platforms continue to evolve, and new sets of public and private tools emerge, firms will need to establish corporate governance policies and “agile” IT architectures, which not only support dynamic communication, but also promote deeper and richer interactions that make businesses productive and thriving.

Since any collaborative tool has a human intervention side to it, the scourge of data theft and data misuse will always remain the main concern—and the main deterrent towards its use for several enterprises.

“Often, IT managers are left with the option of adopting a mechanism of close monitoring. And, reviewing the purpose for which the data was brought to use in the first place,” explains Minhaz Zia, National Sales Manager, Unified Communications of Cisco India and SAARC.

While this is a double-edged sword, putting in advanced measures of training, guidelines and control, is a prudent way to keeping negative impacts at bay.
Therefore, executive staffs, who take such initiatives, should be informed of the problems and be involved in the security, rather than be allowed to off-load responsibility to the security team. This will encourage a culture of security that is both collaborative and structured, and is also ingrained throughout the organisation’s processes.

There is a combination of things an enterprise has to employ to address the security challenges. “As IT managers will employ technical means to prevent, or detect, such occurrences, corporate policies should be formulated in a manner which act as a deterrent,” says Ashwani Tikoo, CIO, CSC in India

Most enterprises are going in for background checks and track records of the prospective employees to unearth past records.While marketing, PR, and sales are prominent when it comes to a global usage of collaboration tools, other core functional areas of the enterprise are increasingly experimenting with these tools, with positive results. HR, CRM, supply-relationship management, product development and innovation or even service delivery are all parts of the value chain that can derive advantages from social networking tools.

Confronting challenges
Nevertheless, as organisations look at the future of social media, they must confront challenges such as lack
of governance and IT involvement, which may impact the successful integration of these new platforms and technologies.

MAJOR ENTERPRISE COMMUNICATORS

• CHATTER: Chatter is a real-time cloud based collaboration tool for enterprises that enables employees to share the status of important projects and deals instantly
• YAMMER : Founded in December 2007, Yammer is a Twitter like tool for improving workplace communication
• SHAREPOINT: It’s a software platform developed by Microsoft for collaboration and web publishing combined under a single server. It has capabilities for developing web sites, portals, intranets, CMS and BI tools
• LOTUS: Lotus is a collaboration solution from IBM that provides rich chat (IM, audio, video), online meetings, and group collaboration.

• CISCO’S ENTERPRISE COLLABORATION PLATFORM (ECP): It enables teams and knowledge workers to quickly and securely create, share, and scale content and expertise. Companies can invite their customers to participate and collaborate and work better.

THE FUTURE OF COLLABORATION

• By 2014, social networking services will replace e-mail as the primary vehicle for interpersonal communications for 20% of business users
• By 2012, over 50% of enterprises will use activity streams that include microblogging, but standalone enterprise microblogging will have less than 5% penetration
• Through 2012, over 70% of IT-dominated social media initiatives will fail Within five years, 70% of collaboration and communications applications designed on PCs will be modelled after user experience lessons from smartphone collaboration applications
• Through 2015, only 25% of enterprises will routinely utilise social network analysis to improve performance and productivity

Source: Gartner

STEPS TO ENTERPRISE COLLABORATION 2.0

• Define the level of member involvement and cross dependencies
• Formulate the moderation team comprising of members from various functions
• Ensure maximum scalability and flexibility of the medium, with features that can be turned on and off like a tap
• Document a clear security and crisis management policy
• Chalk out the expectations from the platform

jatinder.singh@9dot9.in