The Big Announcement: Walmart signs on with Workplace!

Workplace by facebook has just entered a whole new orbit with the new customer win they announced with Walmart. Getting one of the world’s largest employers with over 2 million employees to sign up for the platform is no mean feat.

We at Kwench have been quietly working with the Workplace team to build out this revolution. One of the biggest motivators we had to work on this exciting collaboration platform is the promise it holds for a ‘frictionless world’ of communication within the organization. Today communication in organizations are siloed or broken or in some cases both! In a fast moving marketplace, lack of communication is the ultimate innovation killer. Companies grapple with disparate systems that barely talk to each other, Departments that prefer ‘their own solution’ and communication mechanisms that are frustrating, slow and frankly out of touch with the way the next generation communicates. 

Facebook is a platform that close to 2 Billion people use every month! People know facebook. They ‘get’ it! Mark Zukerberg recently unveiled Facebook’s new mission to ‘help build communities and also help people get exposed to new perspectives.’ Now that’s a moonshot we totally can align with.

The New World of Work: Communication and Collaboration.

Kwench has been working with enterprise clients since inception and in the last decade we have built cloud and social enterprise platforms that are used by some of the top companies. We have seen communication change and I think Workplace has the future direction bang on.

The smart and early adopters in enterprise platforms, the ones looking to get a constant edge over their competitors in the marketplace are working hard, really hard, on removing the ‘friction’ in communication and collaboration among their employees. These companies are not just breaking down the silos they are decimating them and building a framework that supports and facilitates seamless interactions.

Enterprise software is moving into three layers.

(a) Systems of Record: These are the ones that handle the ‘plumbing’ of the organization. They are essential to keep records of people, of transactions and everything else that the organization does. HRMS, CRM, ITSM, F&A platforms all fit in here.

(b) Systems of Intelligence: This is the latest entrant into the system – the intermediary layer that isolates the systems of record from end users and makes the interactions seamless. The CEO wants to know the latest billing for his top 5 customers – he doesn’t want to know which system to login to and retrieve the data. In a way this is a pretty exciting layer where Bots, NLP and AI are playing a big role. People want information and interactions in a way that they would naturally talk in not have to become a bot themselves.

(c)  Systems of Engagement: This is where Workplace comes in – it encompasses the entire layer below it and is pretty much what the end user sees. The native facebook UI/UX means the learning curve is practically zero. The millennials love it. It is secure. It is deployable at any scale from a 10 person start up to a Multi-Million employee organization like Walmart.

Where do we go from here?

The adoption of Workplace by a market leader like Walmart is testimony to the possibilities that the platform holds. Kwench bots are busy scurrying around behind the scenes facilitating interactions to drive employee engagement. There is a strong developer network that is working hard to build more and more exciting features. The core platform itself is evolving with more platform integrations like Box, Drive etc. all the time.

As with the iceberg, what you are seeing is just the tip! There is so much more out there that’s coming – these are exciting times.