Features & Benefits
When times are challenging, innovation is even more important than ever. Historical evidence has shown that companies that can find ways to continue to innovate through a recession leapfrog the rest in coming out the other side and almost always end up gaining market share. However, companies know now, more than ever, that they can only innovate if an ROI case can be made. Social Business Integrator has a fundamental ROI and can help any organization remain ahead of their competitors. More often than not, innovation is down to the ability of employees being able to find information. Reducing these barriers is one of the fundamental values of Platform 46.
Social Business Integrator from Platform 46 delivers a central nervous system to any organization, be they large or small. Whatever occurs in an enterprise can be communicated quickly and effectively with no user involvement, and without the intrusive nature and needless bandwidth wastage of email. Through the use of the innovative “Connector Framework”, Social Business Integrator provides a springboard for efficiency by allowing a personalized dashboard for all employees, highlighting content and data for the diverse needs of an organizational community.
Providing this personalized experience using real-time organizational and external feeds is key to building effective relationships within enterprises. Social Business Integrator provides real-time feeds based on the employee profile, groups and personal choices, delivering significant ROI in the following areas:
• Significantly increases ROI on existing key enterprise applications
• Quickens the flow of knowledge and generation of ideas within the ranks
• Open access & visibility to the effectiveness of employees
• Create competition within major organizational functions
• Support of online communities of users
• Reduce Email volume and associated costs
• Increases effectiveness of email as a communication tool
• Attain & retain staff
• Communicate across disparate domains & even merging companies
• Allow fast & cheap messaging
• Creating Heroes within organizations
Significantly increase ROI on key Enterprise Applications
There are two ways to justify an investment in enterprise applications – increase revenues or reduce costs. Every application that an organization invests in must provide ROI in one or both of these areas. However, creating ROI is often difficult, especially in large enterprise systems that offer infrastructure to many business units and are designed to strategically align IT into the rest of the organisation.
As an example, let’s take CRM systems. With CRM systems, costs can only be reduced so much. The true ROI in CRM comes from increasing the revenues of the organization. This is not easy to measure, and hence we often concentrate on the cost reductions. When looking at the revenue increases achieved through a CRM system, at a high-level this can only be derived from three areas – better customer management, targeted selling efforts and focused customer retention. Undoubtedly these are benefits that have occurred.
However, what if we can now add a fourth source of increased revenue – increasing the visibility of sales success and creating competition within the sales force? With Social Business Integrator, this is indeed possible and cost-effectively so. By taking live data from your CRM system, and communicating relevant parts to the rest of the team, you can instantly create an environment of friendly competition and hence increase performance and revenue from the sales force.
By building real-time feeds from other Enterprise Applications, such as document management and help-desk systems you can recreate this amongst other employees. For example, real-time feeds informing people when a document has been changed and completed will allow project members to know when they are able to read new pieces of work. Notifying people when a support ticket has been completed (and by whom) incentivizes employees to close support tickets. Use your imagination. What applications do you have where real-time feeds can benefit your organization?
Quickens the flow of knowledge and generation of ideas within the ranks
One of the key elements of Social Business Integrator is news and event feeds from different IT systems. Social Business Integrator provides the platform for allowing a company to increase the visibility of these events throughout the organization. A simple of act of making work in progress or key events visible to others breaks an organizations insularity, and help generate new ideas by enabling unplanned collaborations between different parts and employees of the organization. This will directly improve overall organizational effectiveness and agility to respond to market and customer needs.
Open access & visibility to the effectiveness of employees
Now that so much happens on computers connected to networks, it is possible to measure aspects of the working life that organisations do not currently realise they can. There are some big problems that can be soluble if we can measure more. The most important of all is the defining flaw of large organizations - they cannot tell who the most productive people are. A small company is measured directly by the market. But once an organization gets big enough that people on in the interior are protected from market forces, politics starts to rule, instead of performance. An improvement of even a few percent in the ability to measure what actually happens in large organizations will have a huge impact. Measuring & highlighting performance through league tables, real-time feeds, and User Profile access creates significant benefits for all organizations.
Create competition within major organizational functions
Central to Social Business Integrator is the News Feed. This is the central nervous system of a company as this is where employee’s can see the achievements of others & themselves in real-time. For example, as your CRM system updates to reflect a sale the News Feed is automatically updated to highlight to the rest of the company (or just the sales team if configured that way) that the Account Manager has made a sale. Details such as value of the sale and the customer can also be added if required. Alternatively, if a Help-Desk system is updated to reflect a closed support ticket, the News Feed can be automatically updated with this information.
Alongside this News Feed are customizable league tables, such as leading sales person for the Quarter or the top Help Desk person for the month. This is customizable as every organization has different approaches. For example, some organizations may also wish to have the bottom of the league for sale too as an illustration of under-performing people. This ability to customize is key to providing a fast, effective means of communication of employee performance, and hence drives internal competition.
Support of online communities of users
Currently organizations must face up to the fact that their employees are using external sites, such as MySpace, FaceBook and Twitter as an online community. This will not stop. However, what is worrying is that with nowhere else to turn, employees use these sites to discuss work-related issues, which directly affects your brand. Social Business Integrator gives this generation of employees a place to discuss work in a modern context, without harming your brand.
It is true to say that over half of immediate friend circles that employees establish in external sites are their work colleagues. It is also true that the majority of them talk on topics which have direct connection to a work event. (e.g “Jane is stressed out with a tough customer call”). Imagine the benefits of providing a platform to help them to network more freely within the organization about everything work related.
Reduce Email volume and associated costs
One of the obvious benefits derived from using Social Business Integrator is the ability to have employees interacting on content without sending masses of emails (with attachments). Not only can this be burdensome and time consuming, it can also cause bandwidth headaches on the network, and clog up inboxes with emails that not everyone needs to view. Implementing Social Business Integrator will help to reduce email and employees will only subscribe if the content is relevant to them.
Other benefits in this area include the fact that since documents can all reside in one place, individuals can use bookmarking on the corporate social network and use auto-news updates to stay informed. In fact, small behavioural changes like getting people to share and interact with content through an online community instead of via emails can produce substantial ROI. There are huge costs associated with storing and delivering e-mail, and even a small reduction in the overall volume of email can deliver substantial savings.
Moving to a corporate social networking platform will cut down on the quantity of emails sent within your company and the associated costs of storing and sending these emails. This is an easy cost-cutting exercise realize.
Increases effectiveness of email as a communication
Email still has its place in a Corporate Social Network., especially where there is a need for direct communications and in situations where a private response is expected. However, for a broad audience, a Corporate Social Network is more appropriate. This significantly enhances the effectiveness of email as a communication tool, as the amount of email is dramatically reduced.
Attain & Retain Staff
Corporate Social Networking can also greatly aid in talent management. For example, having such a solution in place can attract and secure more candidates to open positions. Millions of people use social networking sites like Twitter, FaceBook & MySpace; millions use instant messaging; and millions subscribe to more than one social networking site. What this has led to is the recognition that new & innovative technologies in the workplace make people more likely to consider a potential job opportunity. Using the lure of Corporate Social Networking when hiring new candidates is a fundamental part of getting these people to choose your company. In addition, a Corporate Social Networking solution can improve retention rates of existing employees because driving interactivity across groups provides a more comfortable and enriched environment in which to do business. It is becoming more and more evident that the latest generation expects social networking at work – much like people expect email.
Communicate across disparate domains & even merging companies
When restructuring, the cost benefits of using a solution from Social Business Integrator will accelerate over time. This is especially so with the number of mergers and acquisitions occurring. In this situation, communication across these merging companies becomes difficult. The cost of integrating email, CRM, ERP etc systems is often excessive in terms of both cost and time. Such companies find that an easy-to-use, Corporate Social Network is an easier way to drive communication across multiple groups or entities. In these situations it is imperative that the employees communicate in ways that drive attention as opposed to thwarting it. For example, frequent mass emails are no longer an effective means of communication. Regular communication is vital today, and the more social the better. Collaboration through trusted domains provides widespread company-wide and individual benefits.
Allow fast & cheap messaging
In any business environment, effective internal business communication is vital. Social Business Integrator is ideal for this because of the social and collaborative nature it encompasses. Effective communication is critical to easing employees’ anxiety, driving trust, and retaining focus on productivity. The more social the environment in which to have these discussions the more your company will be able to drive this kind of value. In many ways, Social Business Integrator is a nicer, cheaper, and more cheerful means to drive communication.
Creating Heroes within organizations
People by nature desire recognition and praise when they achieve. This is true whether at home, on a sports field, or at work. However, this is often neglected, or left to an immediate manager at work. Platform 46 was initially founded based on the concept of creating heroes at work. By automatically highlighting successes in the organization, effective employee’s lift their game, go home happy having been recognized, and want to work for the company. Creating heroes within organizations provides a better place to work