By Debbie Ashton
This is the first of a three part series of articles looking at the growing and critical role of social technologies in Professional Services (PS) organizations. In this first part, I'll discuss why Professional Services are ripe for social technologies—almost more so than any other business function.
Some professional services teams may be rightfully skeptical of the latest hype from Silicon Valley, but "social" will spread through the business world. In "The Social Economy: Unlocking Value and Productivity through Social Technologies" the McKinsey Global Institute studied the potential impact of social on multiple industries and found that "Although Social Media will help many industries, Professional Services have just about the greatest potential of any industry to see real ROI benefits."
It's time for Professional Services businesses to take a close look at their adoption of social tools and processes.
Professional Services is inherently social by nature. It is an intensely collaborative, project-based, and knowledge-based business. Solid collaboration across departments and geographies are not "nice to haves", but requirements. So why are we still limiting their productivity by drowning them in pointless email chains?
Let's face it: "Reply All" is not collaboration. With traditional tools, like email, knowledge is often silo-ed between teams, departments, or geographies and your email inbox. As long as this is the case, teams will struggle to leverage this knowledge and effectively collaborate. How many times did you learn, after the fact, that someone else in the company or team had specific expertise or knowledge needed for a customer? How many times do you find yourself re-answering the same questions or re-sending the same documents?
These problems are nothing new. How long have we heard discussion about collaboration and teamwork? So far, the technology has not quite lived up to the hype. Too often, documents or knowledge do not make it into the system, or access to the tools remains limited. Too often, the overhead required to make legacy technologies deliver on these needs has resulted in poor adoption or high administration costs. At this point, new solutions are needed.
Luckily, social media technologies made specifically for business have arrived just in time to help professional services teams take on a more visible and collaborative role in their companies. The term "social" is much more than a specific product, but new ways to communicate and share.
In the next installment of this series, I'll discuss the functional role that social plays within Professional Services organizations and how PS teams can look to harness the technology to be more effective.
Debbie Ashton is Vice President, Product and Customer Success at FinancialForce.com.
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