What social networking vendors offer, for businesses…

The social networking scene has taken the web by storm as Blogger, Wikipedia, Facebook, MySpace and countless others expand peoples’ reach way beyond their physical community to realms that span across cyberspace.

It so easy.

People create a profile and voilà !

They’re set to share content, ideas and opinions.

Social networking, especially for those who know their way around, is insanely cool. It’s no surprise that so many organizations are looking to setup their own, internally. Once a business social network is up and running, if it’s done right, employees and managers can connect among themselves with ease.

One theory, with regards to business social networks, is that good ideas get validated and bad ideas get discarded more quickly, which leads to faster product development — but it’s just a theory.

In general, companies will benefit, in various ways, from the content that’s being created, shared, added upon and archived for later use.

Any company can make social networking yield benefits but like most new things, it would be foolish to attempt to qualify its financial bottomline usefulness with hard metrics. For the time being, it’s more a matter of getting in early than trying to catch up, later on.

So assuming you’re ready to launch your internal social network, which solution should you choose? Well, that’s for the IT guys to decide but to get the ball rolling, consider the following vendors…

• Drupal
  • Open source.
  • Great at community-driven sites.
  • Blogs and profiles.
• IBM Lotus Connections
  • Paid software.
  • Helps you execute tasks more quickly by using dynamic networks of coworkers, partners and customers
  • Blogs, profiles, social bookmarks, communities and more.
• Jive Software
  • Licensed software or hosted SaaS.
  • Integrates the “enterprise 2.0″ capabilities of collaboration software, community software and social networking software.
  • Wikis, blogs, profiles, social bookmarks, tags, discussions and more.
• MS-SharePoint
  • Paid server software, MS SaaS or hosted by 3rd parties.
  • In its own words: connecting people, process and information.
  • Wikis, blogs, profiles and communities.
• NewsGator
  • Paid software. Extends MS-SharePoint.
  • Empower employees, customers and partners to collaborate, communicate, and innovate in order to create business value through social computing.
  • SharePoint add-ons for tags, tag clouds, expert search, discussions and more.
• Scuttle
  • Open source.
  • Light on the more advanced features but does social bookmarking like it should.
  • Social bookmarking.
• Socialtext
  • Paid hosted service or on-location server appliance.
  • Used for all employees to get a collective view of what’s going on and share content.
  • Wikis, blogs, profiles, social bookmarks and microblogging.
• Telligent
  • Lease the software or buy perpetual licenses.
  • Designed for high-volume communities where performance and up-time are critical.
  • Wikis, blogs, profiles, groups and communities, social analytics and more.

And as you continue searching for vendors, expect to find lots of other worthwhile finds. Keep in mind that the big software firms are currently being swarmed by waves of smaller firms offering solid codesets and eye-pleasing visuals so expect the heated competition to go on, for a while.

In case you were just thinking about this…

Yes, open source has an advantage over most paid and hosted solutions: it’s free!

It’s also instantly available through a simple download and there’s no licensing fee, whatsoever. If you can make up for a little less “business-class support”, open source scripts will likely end up being your first and all-time best choice. Keep in mind open source projects evolve all the time and all those upcoming updates will also be… free. Which is nice.

And don’t forget that open source projects usually come with mountains of useful plug-ins which add bleeding edge features to your core script. Plus the fact you can dive right into your code and tweak just about anything you want. No encryption here.

But perhaps open source is not your thing.

If that’s your case, paid scripts (or software) or hosted solutions is where you’ll most likely end up as very few organizations develop their own social networking engine from scratch.

With such solutions, the deeper your pockets, the more features you’ll get.

And you’re not too picky, customizationwise, you’ll be up and running rather quickly. Software as a service (or “Saas”) is where many mid-sized companies like to do business because everything’s hosted externally. There can be some cost saving at first but as the content volume grows, it can inflate the rent to the point where it’s not that much of a deal anymore so watch out for that. Do your mathematical projections before you sign-up.

Paid software is generally hosted in-house and it’s generally yours for life but remember that the upgrades might cost you a lot of dough, over and above all the other technical maintenance cost. Again, do your mathematical projections before rearranging your server room to accomodate a business social networking software solution.

If you still feel anxious about deploying a social network in your enterprise, seek help from the vendors themselves or from local IT firms which specialize in web 2.0 stuff.

All in all, if your organization is still unsure about wether it’s worth it to have an internal social network, consider that employees will get access to blogs, wikis and tools that let them communicate, collaborate and share information.

The real bottom-line question might be, how much is it worth, to your enterprise, to have its employees using applications it controls and manages? Once that question is answered, everything else aligns itself accordingly.

Tags: social networking, social networks, internal networks, company social network, enterprise, business, social networking vendors, ibm, lotus, jive, sharepoint, saas, hosted solutions, paid software, .net, microsoft, blogs, wikis, search, information, connect, share, content, server

Social networking in business

Networking isn’t new.

Social networking is the online equivalent of a offline meeting where, among other things, geography and schedules wouldn’t matter. Now, that’s a weird concept for some C-level dinosaurs but for the tech-savvy managers moving up, it makes perfect sense.

At the very foundation of networking, there are two things: humans and communications.

In a business setting, a basic goal would be for ideas to be clearly communicated, among all “humans”, in the organization. A more advanced goal would be for those ideas to mature and turn into “value”, one way or another.

Blogs and wikis haven’t replaced email messages and chatting but they’ve definitely added shared spaces where project data (and ideas) can more easily pollinate, more often than not, in ways that were largely unpredictable. Putting the information “out there”, for an entire team (or company) to see is a powerful way to leverage teamwork.

Social networking for businesses see communities of interest spring up around subject matters rather than organizational hierarchies. If you’ve been in business for a while, you’re well aware that the best ideas don’t necessarily come from the “top brass”. Networking at all levels of a company smashes the invisible glass walls which have the bad habit of strangling innovation, big time.

Generally speaking, social applications provide business value by letting people add context to information stores which, in turn, helps others identify what’s useful to them — it also makes search results that much more relevant.

Social bookmarks are a nice example of this since team members can share the web resources they like and learn from others about web destinations that have been overlooked. After a while, the bookmark list becomes a real time saver.

Naturally, enterprise social networking helps people find and connect with co-workers through user profiles, expert search and social graphs that map out any employee’s connections throughout the organization. This, in and of itself, makes for a strong argument for social networking, in the modern workplace.

Finding co-workers with domain-specific knowledge, in just a few clicks, can really propel any organization to a whole new level of communications, productivity, teamwork and of course, profitability.

Some organizations are obsessed with the “dangers of wasting time” wrongly associated with social networking. But that’s very bad management since social networking is a communications enabler and as such, it’s built to help channel information to the right people, wherever the people may be in the organizational chart.

If you’re just starting out in the social networking for business “adventure”, make sure to take a look at the quality open source scripts that are available to structure your data into blogs, forums, wikis or just about any other way you wish.

Tags: social networking, enterprise, business, work, workplace, colleagues, co-workers, employees, team members, managers, c-level, executives, decisions, ideas, communications, information, organization, open source, blogs, wikis

Time to break down the corporate silos

In the modern enterprise, information technology is an enabler for more productive collaboration between all departments, units and workers.

At a time when key performance indicators (or KPIs) should be readily available for all information workers and especially the C-level, it seems too many decisions are still taken without a clear picture of the real-time data that underlies critical applications, infrastructure and projects.

So even if IT could deliver awesome “dashboards”, ripe with timely and highly readable information, it seems way too many companies fail to tear down their corporate silos to produce such data.

The advantages of overcoming the silo approach makes it possible to envision a much better understanding of the company, as a whole. For instance, in an “un-siloed” company using , the IT department can get much better “real time” information so to anticipate (and resolve) the problems instead of merely reacting to them.

Having some kind of central repository, most likely gathering data from many sources, makes so much sense because to be able, in a single window, to identify [for instance] the performance of critical systems and projects in real time empowers people to act on things, way before problems occur.

It seems straightforward enough to work as a company-wide team but still, too many companies force their employees to rely on manual extrapolation of multiple applications, each containing silos of critical data, to go about their daily work. At best, this results in hit-or-miss decision making and a dangerous slide towards a certain inertia. At worst, working from flawed assumptions leads to significant costs, delays and wasted resources.

Retrofitting portal software to pull together solied data can help but overall, it does little to correlate information into useful guidance. In regards to software destined to enterprises of all sizes looking to implement dashboards, inquire with vendors such as BMC, Oracle, CA, Hewlett-Packard and IBM who are melding business service management (BSM), business intelligence (BI) as well as project and portfolio management (PPM) tools into overall dashboards.

Expect implementation and integration to be somewhat demanding while customization is plain inevitable (call it a “technical challenge”). This complex work might involve SOAP or XML bridges, especially if your application infrastructure isn’t homogeneous.

The payoff for such a bold transformative project towards dashboards mainly resides in the newfound ability to have largely useless data chunks (when taken individually) suddenly provide highly correlative insight, from all the data collected.

If your company isn’t using dashboards yet, now is probably a goodtime to break down those antiquated corporate silos to create infinite value from your various data sources.

Tags: dashboards, corporate silos, bsm, bi, ppm, kpi, it, critical data, information, enterprise

Companies need to deal with mashups

Do you remember when you were young and you mixed and matched the different “food zones” that your mom had carefully delimited in your plate?

You were looking for best tasting combination to satisfy your personal preferences. Right there and then, you were mashing up food so your meal would taste the way -you- like it.

Fast forward in 2008, mashups are based on the same food mixing logic only this time, data is being rearranged to fit personal preferences.

Web users “mashup their data” all the time, mainly on their desktop but also, more often now, online.

The rise of AJAX coding has jazzed things up quite a bit, within even the most mundane (static or lightly dynamic) web pages.

In a no-frills scenario, with just a few mouse clicks, a user can decide that a given “mashable start page” will include (1) local news, (2) the titles of the last 10 emails received, (3) a link to the top 20 pop radio hits and why not, (4) the local sports team’s interactive calendar — these snippets of information are called blocks and typically, they can be rearranged by the user for his own needs.

In clear, users are now more in control of which information they see and how it’s presented to them. This approach fits perfectly with the “web 2.0 thinking” but is that the kind of flexibility companies are looking for?

As usual, home computer users bring some of their computing habits to the office and wether they’re prepared for it or not, the enterprise IT has to deal with them. Mashups are simply the latest in a long list of emerging technologies to cross the “home-to-office” bridge.

Opposing views over innovation VS governance spawn heated debate over mashups because while rearranging data might make the worker happier and more efficient, the governance efforts might hit a wall trying to follow-up with “infinitely personalized” work environments and online tools.

By keeping in mind that a mashup is a web application that combines data or services from more than one source into a single integrated application, it’s easy to anticipate the rise of the user as the end of the line “programmer” of information in the way that best fits his needs so in this kind of “mashed future”, the governance people fight an uphill battle.

Governance should be careful not to stiffle innovation, including the emerging mashups, because old IT -and- antiquated work methods could hurt a company in more ways than one.

Once a user has tasted the sheer power of mashups, it’s likely going to be quite frustrating going back to rigid, user-unfriendly interfaces presenting all the wrong information within a marathon of different “screens” that just don’t foster any level of heightened productivity… and work satisfaction.

With the powerful drive from web services and SOAs (service-oriented architectures), governance proponents should probably bite the bullet now and embrace mashups instead of hurting innovation by enforcing rigid rules that nobody but them are likely to appreciate… and approve of.

Tags: mashups, data, information, gui, interfaces, content, web 2.0, governance

BI’s role in the intelligent enterprise

When in charge of making all the right decisions for their company, more executives than ever before like to consult their business intelligence (or “BI”) reports for added insight regarding the current, past and more importantly, future events.

The use of BI applications and tools among executives has been growing over the past decade and depending on who you ask, roughly 25% of all workers use on flavor or another of BI in the course of their work.

While this might sound encouraging, BI’s use is nowhere near as widespread as the major business intelligence vendors would have you believe.

In fact, the BI tools themselves are partially to blame for the somewhat lackluster adoption level currently observed. Add company cultures that encourage gut-and-feel decision makin to the mix and BI software, whatever the flavor, will have a hard time getting past the security guard’s booth!

To make matters worse, many companies tolerate information hoarding or, alternatively, allow IT department administrators to zealously lock away data that should, by all means, be made available to more employees for —you guessed it— basic to advanced BI applications.

The value proposition for BI might be obvious for the vendors but countless executives still don’t understand the advantages of business intelligence software over standard ERP system reports and, in some case, manual spreadsheets.

Executives and employees alike should take another look at BI tools out there in order to reap value from data to deliver, among other things, best-in-class service, boost revenue and increase operating efficiencies.

The future seems to belong to those who best understand the strategic importance of the proverbial gold mine hidden in their hard drives, waiting to be analyzed and used in creative, new ways, BI-style.

Tags: bi, business intelligence, data, information, spreadsheets, value, revenue