Enterprise Social Is Not Facebook

The Facebook-like approach that represents the foundation of Enterprise Social today is seriously struggling. And Chatter, while useful for sharing updates about what employees are doing or thinking – and to a somewhat lesser extent, sharing documents – have simply not taken off. Why?

The reasons are unclear, but analysts and industry experts alike, along with those of us here at gen-E, have seen this phenomenon take shape. Our team has experimented with it first-hand over the past 18-24 months, and what we strongly believe is that organizations can exploit network effects via Social within a business context only insofar as that network helps employees do their jobs better.  And that is where automation comes in.  Added to the equation, automation makes Enterprise Social useful, which brings us to our unique value proposition at gen-E.

The mission of ‘Social’ technology within our Resolve Social ITPA platform is to

• Increase the dissemination and use of institutional knowledge and automation tools to make our customers’ business more efficient.
• Provide users a forum to collaborate, share experiences and contribute innovative ideas in way that benefits the user and their employer.
• Harness weak ties across organizational boundaries to strengthen operational excellence and thereby increase the pace of innovation and learning within the enterprise.

Resolve was built from the ground up to encourage sharing, and in fact, includes Social embedded at the platform layer to maximize collaboration across your network. How does it work? To give you a brief example, exceptions within the automation process in Resolve initiate social collaboration, meaning support staff are alerted when exceptions occur, and they’re able to instantly interact with live running processes – to offer their insight, to learn, adapt and quickly take action. All the while, the organization’s process knowledge is improved and updated in real-time, so that the wisdom gained at that particular point in time is available for ongoing use. Now that is how Social makes sense in the enterprise.

Want to learn more? Take a look at these Resolve videos for starters: http://www.gen-e.com/onecolumnList/Video. And feel free to contact our team of experts with any questions you may have. We look forward to hearing from you.

IT Game Changer: Unleashing Tribal Knowledge in Enterprise IT

A community is a collection of people with common needs and wants. Safety. Food. Happiness. The need to work more efficiently is a driving force behind the human desire to form communities, and experts have found that empowering the connection between efficiency and community represents an opportunity to make meaningful improvements in a corporate context.

But the innate sense of community often gets blurred in a corporation, although the need to work towards common goals and make use of “tribal knowledge” to improve efficiency is no less present. The biggest obstacle to corporate efficiency is the complexity of underlying goals and of the relationships involved in meeting those goals. We have 18^th century business models to thank for this phenomenon–they’ve left their mark and continue to pervade today’s corporate structures.

Even as modern communication tools such as email and micro blogging have made some improvements, the fact remains that cooperation and collaboration are still insufficient to promote a level of corporate efficiency that can make a lasting impact.

The community of IT workers that design, implement and support enterprise communications and computing provides an example of the inefficiencies of today’s organizations. They frequently work within highly-siloed cultures operating through complex hierarchies of specialization. The challenges they face on a daily basis often take precedence over their ability to move the organization forward. As a result, they are less strategic, more reactive and less effective collectively.

What are today’s most successful organizations doing to overcome these IT “community” issues? They’re applying three distinct innovations to “superpower” their IT professionals, and as a result, they’re reaping significant efficiency savings by eliminating much of the manual interactions between people and the systems they support. Those three innovations are SOCIAL, KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT (KM) and AUTOMATION.

Our Resolve software embraces all of these innovations, and we believe it represents a significant IT game changer in terms of its capability to make powerful connections between efficiency and community. Resolve is a software platform that is defining an emerging IT management discipline called social IT process automation (ITPA). It drives social ITPA through the use of Wikis, which centralize operational knowledge for easy sharing across the enterprise, while also automating up to 90 percent of IT tasks.

No other ITPA solution on the market brings together the big three – social, KM and automation – like Resolve. We are seeing Resolve customers, from large communication service providers to global financial corporations, achieve efficiency increases of more than 250 percent in a matter of months. You can read more about the game-changing possibilities that you can achieve with Resolve here: www.socialitpa.com

On a side note, the book, “Tribal Leadership,” by Dave Logan, John King and Halee Fischer-Wright, served as an inspiration for this post. If you haven’t yet read it, I highly recommend it. Visit the book’s website for more details: http://www.triballeadership.net/book.