This morning’s announcement here at Dreamforce today from
Salesforce.com CRM Services of Chatter, an enterprise-class
realization of Facebook and Twitter, is further evidence of the
industry’s push for social Web capabilities for business
activities. Early indications are that Chatter will drive
conversation and attention on this subject in CRM management and
enterprise circles very much like Google Wave did for consumer
circles (as well as some businesses.)
Of course, a central question is — given current economic
challenges for example — whether this is what the enterprise
world is really looking for right now. However, as I’ve covered
here throughout the year, enterprise social computing has been
coming into its own as a significant component of modern
business software for a number of reasons lately.
So while adoption numbers vary, it’s an increasingly smart bet
that not only are social applications moving into the
enterprise, but that existing business applications will begin
to get more and more social features.
I often cite Reed’s Law as compelling evidence that social
systems have a strong innate tendency to create more value that
non-social systems. The message: Social business applications
are just a more effective model in general for building business
value. However announcements like Chatter begin to make this
argument less important. That’s because it’s built right into
the Salesforce.com marketing automation platform and according
to Sam Diaz “will be included in all paid editions of Salesforce
CRM and Force.com.” In other words, the argument is essentially
over when social computing becomes baked into the infrastructure
of the enterprise.
This will allow the 135,000+ existing apps built on Force.com
sales force management to have a unified social environment
complete with security and one common social graph as well as
consistent, shared collaboration features. This is a major step
up from the traditional world of non-social sales CRM business
course software, all the more so because it’s as much of an
infrastructure play as an application play. A comparable
response would be to make Microsoft Office more social or
perhaps more accurately, the fundamental Google Apps
infrastructure. It’s also arguable that the new Microsoft
SharePoint 2010 is just such a move (creating an enterprise-wide
social environment that’s also an app platform) that’s just not
as clearly communicated.
In the end there’s a lot to be said — particularly in the
sometimes uncertain realm of enterprise social computing — about
having a secure solution that works across your application
environment and is easy to integrate into your existing
applications, courses, and user environments. And while the
Salesforce sales automation ecosystem is far from a consistent
sales force management application environment for most
enterprises, which are a complex landscape of legacy systems
from dozens of vendors, it highlights the next big shift:
Intranets, portals, and software suites that are the integrating
force of the social fabric for our organizations.
Chatter is a solid example of the basic features that we’d
expect in an Enterprise 2.0 solution and what is increasingly
called a ‘social operating system‘:
Breakdown of Salesforce.com’s Chatter
• User Profiles This is the foundation of any enterprise social
network and contains individual user identity as well as a list
of colleagues or followers.
• Status Updates: This is the basis of sharing information with
those that are following you. This is different that more
focused collaboration and workshop scenarios since it
automatically goes out to all your followers. Status updates are
useful for ambient capture, distribution, and archival of
situational and otherwise largely tacit knowledge.
• Activity Streams: This is the flow of information that comes
primarily from status updates but can also be from bots and
other systems designed to detect important business seminars and
insert them into the stream that you watch. The Facebook news
feed is an an example of an activity stream. Chatter displays
this on the Chatter home page and even intelligently threads
responses to status messages, a sorely needed feature in fast
moving business environments. Activity streams form an essential
knowledge flow that creates actionable collective intelligence
over time.
• Groups: This feature allows workers to self-organize and
create their own groups within sales force automation and share
updates and content. Groups are useful for more focused
collaborative activity.
• Feeds: Data flows in social systems and regular IT systems are
increasingly embodied in simple streams called feeds. Feed can
stream relevant data, real-time status updates and like Google
Wave this is not only from people, but also from content and
other applications.
• Social Content: Business information embodied in documents,
spreadsheets and presentations can be given a social layer that
can alert the entire company in workshops or seminars when
certain changes have been made, usually through activity
streams. This is just like how people are notified when new
pictures or links are posted on consumer social networks.
Developers can use this for any IT application or class or
workshop that has access to the social platform and creates much
needed situational awareness and vital event notifications in a
single, manageable way.
Finally, Salesforce Chatter has APIs to make it easy for
developers to wrap social features and seminars around their
applications and has connections to and active SDK support for
Google Apps, Facebook, and Twitter.
All of this highlights some major planning that organizations
are going to have to think about as they decide exactly how
social their applications are going to be. As social computing
features get added ad hoc to existing apps and as full blown
social operating systems begin to emerge, it’s a decision point
that more and more organizations will be forced to make.
For my part, I’m waiting for Facebook to realize the big money
proposition of doing VPN social networks that seamlessly and
safely combine consumer and private social networks in a
coherent offering that is compelling to businesses.
Unfortunately, the consumer Web 2.0 world doesn’t readily
understand how to meet enterprise needs or provide the kind of
strategic support and classes required, so for now it’s left to
Salesforce.com, Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, and dozens of startups
to address.
Source: Dion Hinchcliffe
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Related: Salesforce.com CRM
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