Social enterprise newsfeeds offer a great alternative method for capturing communications that you would eventually like to include in your knowledge base. Alongside other institutional knowledge and business intelligence tools, this social data has the potential to help guide decision-making in today’s organizations.
But to leverage social enterprise tools effectively, you have to define where newsfeeds fit into your business information management policies, teach people to access newsfeeds appropriately and encourage user adoption.
Think about all of the different methods your company has for communicating information. If you’re using a system like Office 365, for example, your tools include Microsoft Lync, instant messaging, video and email. And each of these tools plays a different role. For instance, instant messaging is great for communication tasks such as understanding where a colleague is and what they’re working on or getting a quick answer to a question. Email, meanwhile, is useful for more detailed communication.
Helping to integrate those two tools is the social enterprise newsfeed. With an Office 365 newsfeed, you have a variety of different ways to access this information and turn it into organizational knowledge. One of the main advantages of the newsfeed format is that the information is more useable and searchable, instead of being hidden in individual emails, where it’s difficult to track and turn into organizational knowledge.
When building up your social enterprise newsfeeds, it’s important to first describe where it fits in the information management structure and its intended use. From there, the next step is teaching people how to use the newsfeeds within those parameters, but in ways that make the most sense for individual and team working styles. With an application like Yammer, people are able to access newsfeeds via mobile devices, from a desktop application or through a collaboration platform. Alternately, some users find it most useful to access newsfeeds in the form of digests delivered to their email.
No matter which delivery method each user chooses, social enterprise newsfeeds offer a great way to capture these internal communications and eventually incorporate them into your company’s knowledge base. These forms of communication are here to stay, so it’s worth taking some care when fitting them into your information policy in a way that’s appropriate for your organization and business culture.
And it’s also worth concerted efforts to push user adoption and to make these communications habitual within the company. The Office 365 cloud-based environment offers a lot of accessibility benefits that haven’t been available in on-premises solutions, which could make it easier for users to make a habit of using social enterprise tools in consistent and productive ways.
Learn more about implementing a social enterprise strategy by contacting Portal Solutions.
