By Debbie Ashton
This is the second of a three part series of articles looking at the growing and critical role of social technologies in Professional Services (PS) organizations. In the first part, I discussed why Professional Services are ripe for social technologies. In this second part, I'll discuss the ways in which social technologies impact PS teams in ways that other collaborative tools cannot.
Facebook and Twitter have demonstrated the maturation of social tools that work. Tools that make it easier to connect, share, and interact. The advent of cloud technology has also helped to reduce the problem of access through anytime anywhere access. There is no question of the effectiveness of social and mobile in our personal lives. But how does it apply to business?
Sharing cat pictures or videos with friends or photos of planking provide little business value. In fact, many businesses have been sensitive to a loss in productivity in the workplace due to the potential abuse of social technologies and have, as a result, often not only shied away from adopting social tools, but outright banned their usage. However, social tools deliver clear benefits in improving communication, sharing, and collaboration that align with the needs of business. So the question remains, how can social help business?
In the past, tools like email and even face-to-face communication or phones offer limited communication and collaboration to one-on-one conversations. In contrast, social tools open up communication from one-to-one to one-to-many. This, by itself, provides tremendous benefits to teams, allowing professionals to conduct much more productive communication in real time. Instead of asking and answering a question to individuals, social tools make it possible to invite teams into a real-time conversation.
In addition, social tools make the discussion accessible by storing them in feeds and on profiles or groups that anyone can go back and review or search at any time. This is a huge contrast to email which limits each individual to only the conversations they were directly involved with.
Another benefit of social is something termed "ambient awareness" or weak relationships. In email, communication relies on existing, known relationships. If you have a question you are limited to only those people already in your network. In contrast, social allows weak connections to bring pleasant surprises by eliciting conversation and feedback from less well-known people in the company. Do you know the complete history and knowledge of everyone in your company?
Effectiveness and communication are core benefits of social, but social tools go well beyond delivering just this. Social provides a very effective platform for sharing knowledge as well. One example is the ability to include knowledge and documents in conversation streams, another is the ability to easily access and search for that content.
In the most effective uses of social, the connections go beyond individuals and make it possible to "follow" documents, customers, or projects and keep knowledge in context. As a result, rather than attempting to find and bring together information, social tools can enable teams to collaborate around these artifacts with social tools. And many social tools tie in workflow, alerts, and take actions (such as approval in workflow) to fundamentally change the way work gets done.
In the final installment of this series, I'll discuss the right way for PS teams to implement social tools and achieve the promise of a more real-time, collaborative organization.
Debbie Ashton is Vice President, Product and Customer Success at FinancialForce.com.
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