Which social enterprise products are strongest? That depends on the unique needs of your organization and its users. As a report from Gartner notes, technology deployments in general “tend to be very polarizing. Some workers love them, some are indifferent, while others are deeply uncomfortable.”
We recommend that you focus on the customer experience when choosing which products to use. The market is flooded with products offering various features and varying strengths. As outlined in the “magic quadrant,” those products that achieved the best “completeness of vision” and “ability to execute” in the Gartner report were classified as leaders. Those weaker in one area or another were dubbed challengers, visionaries or niche players.
But don’t get caught up in the seemingly endless lists of features and functions with these products. The reality is that the leading social software applications — including Microsoft products such as SharePoint 2013 along with IBM, Jive Software and Salesforce.com — all offer great features and functions. The customer experience you are trying to create should serve as the context for what tools (social or otherwise) your employees need and thus drive your priorities for how you evaluate these different technologies.
For example, will implementing a social solution help reduce response times from one hour to 15 minutes? That’s a quantifiable business impact. Find metrics that matter most to your organization and let them guide you.
The key is to know the context of your business and its users. Start with use cases and work back from there. The question shouldn’t be, “Does my organization need social?” It’s better to ask, “How can I apply social to solve the business challenges that I’ve identified?”
Also, we suggest that organizations evaluate these social enterprise solutions based on the ease in which they’ll integrate with their existing environment. Don’t create a separate silo for social.
Always remember that the most successful social enterprise products tend to fill some specific needs for users. These include helping people quickly find an answer, helping people find expertise in their networks, and allowing people to offer their opinions by tagging and rating content in order to better understand validity and relevancy.
The real challenge, of course, is highlighting those critical business needs. Organizations tend to skip over that step, but it’s vital to choosing the social enterprise software that’s the best fit for your business. After all, merely having the technology in place doesn’t guarantee user adoption — users have to see the value in using the tools.
Source: Gartner, September 2013
