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Social network tools were found as very productive (since ppl are familiar with them from home). This caused employees to form work groups on commercial product

by itaysk 11y ago

Social network tools were found as very productive (since ppl are familiar with them from home). This caused employees to form work groups on commercial products like Facebook, WhatsApp, etc... companies want to give employees those same tools but under the control of the company and with enhanced governance.

douche 11y ago
Having seen a lot of the content that goes through these products, from the compliance side, I'm not sure that they are particularly "productive." Where they have any uptake at all (surprisingly rare, for such expensive products, that require so much work to implement and roll out), it's pretty... meh. It seems like "social" is a buzzword that is finally starting to lose it's luster, but it was pretty ridiculous for a while - IBM changing the name of Lotusphere to IBM Connections, all of these business Facebook-clones, Microsoft spending a boat-load of money on Yammer, then letting it languish, while building more or less parallel features into SharePoint and Office365. So much hype about "transforming the way people work" and some truly disturbing rhetoric about enabling the blurring of personal and work life. Good riddance.
- a3n 11y ago
  People know how to work. Work gets done despite the lack of these "enabling" social tools, or even despite their presence. People like to play around with how to arrange metawork. Mangers especially like this. A lot of it is yak shaving.
  - devonkim 11y ago
    The level of productivity in so many megacorporations is so low it's just plain alarming. I've commented before at work that if this is all I was able to do in the time I've had at most smaller companies we'd either have gone bankrupt or I'd have been fired. When something as simple and necessary to do your job as "I need access to a gig repo to fix a defect, here's the patch" takes weeks or months, you may get some work done but the rate of actual accomplishments would become basically negative. Enabling users to get something done while adhering to corporate policies effectively is a problem I don't believe anyone has solved for the Fortune 500 as a whole. If they did, I assure you that several billion of a market cap would be a small fraction of their likely valuation. Slack isn't allowed in most places in the F500 as shadow IT goes, for example, but they hit the billion dollar club within months practically because they approached chat in a small manner that Salesforce did. Even a small, tiny win is a billion dollars across these kinds of companies.
    - a3n 11y ago
      > Enabling users to get something done while adhering to corporate policies effectively is a problem I don't believe anyone has solved for the Fortune 500 as a whole. Well, they must have figured out how to get something done, to have survived long enough to get into the Fortune 500. :)
      - devonkim 11y ago
        Most big companies primarily grow through acquisitions and just gluing together innovative efforts and hoping that results in sufficient value after the attrition common after companies are acquired. If big companies could grow like start-ups often, we'd have a very different business climate. It's why big companies are more concerned about losing revenue than growing it - this is the opposite with start-ups. It's what seems obvious when you're near your market cap.
  - mindcrime 11y ago
    People know how to work. Work gets done despite the lack of these "enabling" social tools, or even despite their presence. Of course it does. But does it get done as well, or as effectively, or as efficiently without a certain level of technological support? Would you want to work in a company that didn't use any technological capabilities for collaboration? No email, no IM, no document sharing of any sort, etc? I mean, printing out documents and sending them via one of those old-style interoffice memo envelopes ought to be enough for anybody, right? The thing is, not every company needs the same kind of technological capabilities, because they don't all have the same issues. If you're in a 10 person startup where everybody sits in one room, a lot of knowledge sharing is done by just speaking out loud and everybody hears you. If you're in a 32,000 person company with offices spread around 80 countries, it's a lot harder to make sure that everybody knows everything they need to know, and knows it in a timely manner. And there are "serendipitous communications" that will never happen without some technological help, as you have employees who will almost certainly never meet in person. Or if they do, it'll be once every couple of years. Tooling can be beneficial, it's just important to understand that no tool is a panacea. Also, no tool(s) can fix a toxic company culture, or broken processes. These are reasons some companies deploy technological tools to enhance collaboration and knowledge sharing, and don't see the expected benefits. (Disclaimer: I'm totally biased, as my company makes "enterprise social software". Take everything I say with a grain of salt as you see fit.)
- mindcrime 11y ago
  Having seen a lot of the content that goes through these products, from the compliance side, I'm not sure that they are particularly "productive." Where they have any uptake at all (surprisingly rare, for such expensive products, that require so much work to implement and roll out), it's pretty... meh. My feeling is that a lot of this is because people thought "Hey, we can make a private Facebook clone and drop it inside our organization and people will use it to be more productive". I think that's a mistaken approach. "Social" tools certainly can have value in an organisation, but there's nothing magic about a Facebook clone (or web-based IRC for that matter). Our position at Fogbeam is that ESN's (Enterprise Social Network), in order to provide real value, have to do more. That is, they have to connect with the things and ways that people actually get work done, and make it easier to find (information|people|documents|whatever) that you need to do something... in addition to the fluffier "idle chit chat" aspects. If an ESN can do that, then it can provide value. Of course, I'm biased, as that's one of the ways in which our ESN approach differs from some of the others. We have a tremendous focus on integration with other enterprise applications. And we use semantic web technology to do automatic semantic entity extraction from the text flowing around the system, so we can build a knowledge-base that helps people find related information. I'll be the first to say that a lot of companies have not received as much value from deploying internal social software as they might have expected. We just think it's (in part) because they used first generation social software that doesn't provided the needed capabilities. Another reason that companies fail to get a lot of value from this stuff is much harder to resolve: company culture and values. Simply put, some organisations will NEVER get much value from social software because the internal culture discourages collaboration, and encourages knowledge-hoarding, competition, backstabbing, secrecy and what-not. If Joe Manager at one of those firms puts in Yammer, or Jive, or Lotus Connections, or Fogcutter, or anything else, it's going to fail. In those cases, it has little or nothing to do with the technology. (Disclaimer: I'm totally biased, as my company makes "enterprise social software". Take everything I say with a grain of salt as you see fit.)

by itaysk 11y ago

douche 11y ago

Having seen a lot of the content that goes through these products, from the compliance side, I'm not sure that they are particularly "productive." Where they have any uptake at all (surprisingly rare, for such expensive products, that require so much work to implement and roll out), it's pretty... meh. It seems like "social" is a buzzword that is finally starting to lose it's luster, but it was pretty ridiculous for a while - IBM changing the name of Lotusphere to IBM Connections, all of these business Facebook-clones, Microsoft spending a boat-load of money on Yammer, then letting it languish, while building more or less parallel features into SharePoint and Office365. So much hype about "transforming the way people work" and some truly disturbing rhetoric about enabling the blurring of personal and work life. Good riddance.

a3n 11y ago
People know how to work. Work gets done despite the lack of these "enabling" social tools, or even despite their presence. People like to play around with how to arrange metawork. Mangers especially like this. A lot of it is yak shaving.
- devonkim 11y ago
  The level of productivity in so many megacorporations is so low it's just plain alarming. I've commented before at work that if this is all I was able to do in the time I've had at most smaller companies we'd either have gone bankrupt or I'd have been fired. When something as simple and necessary to do your job as "I need access to a gig repo to fix a defect, here's the patch" takes weeks or months, you may get some work done but the rate of actual accomplishments would become basically negative. Enabling users to get something done while adhering to corporate policies effectively is a problem I don't believe anyone has solved for the Fortune 500 as a whole. If they did, I assure you that several billion of a market cap would be a small fraction of their likely valuation. Slack isn't allowed in most places in the F500 as shadow IT goes, for example, but they hit the billion dollar club within months practically because they approached chat in a small manner that Salesforce did. Even a small, tiny win is a billion dollars across these kinds of companies.
  - a3n 11y ago
    > Enabling users to get something done while adhering to corporate policies effectively is a problem I don't believe anyone has solved for the Fortune 500 as a whole. Well, they must have figured out how to get something done, to have survived long enough to get into the Fortune 500. :)
    - devonkim 11y ago
      Most big companies primarily grow through acquisitions and just gluing together innovative efforts and hoping that results in sufficient value after the attrition common after companies are acquired. If big companies could grow like start-ups often, we'd have a very different business climate. It's why big companies are more concerned about losing revenue than growing it - this is the opposite with start-ups. It's what seems obvious when you're near your market cap.
- mindcrime 11y ago
  People know how to work. Work gets done despite the lack of these "enabling" social tools, or even despite their presence. Of course it does. But does it get done as well, or as effectively, or as efficiently without a certain level of technological support? Would you want to work in a company that didn't use any technological capabilities for collaboration? No email, no IM, no document sharing of any sort, etc? I mean, printing out documents and sending them via one of those old-style interoffice memo envelopes ought to be enough for anybody, right? The thing is, not every company needs the same kind of technological capabilities, because they don't all have the same issues. If you're in a 10 person startup where everybody sits in one room, a lot of knowledge sharing is done by just speaking out loud and everybody hears you. If you're in a 32,000 person company with offices spread around 80 countries, it's a lot harder to make sure that everybody knows everything they need to know, and knows it in a timely manner. And there are "serendipitous communications" that will never happen without some technological help, as you have employees who will almost certainly never meet in person. Or if they do, it'll be once every couple of years. Tooling can be beneficial, it's just important to understand that no tool is a panacea. Also, no tool(s) can fix a toxic company culture, or broken processes. These are reasons some companies deploy technological tools to enhance collaboration and knowledge sharing, and don't see the expected benefits. (Disclaimer: I'm totally biased, as my company makes "enterprise social software". Take everything I say with a grain of salt as you see fit.)
mindcrime 11y ago
Having seen a lot of the content that goes through these products, from the compliance side, I'm not sure that they are particularly "productive." Where they have any uptake at all (surprisingly rare, for such expensive products, that require so much work to implement and roll out), it's pretty... meh. My feeling is that a lot of this is because people thought "Hey, we can make a private Facebook clone and drop it inside our organization and people will use it to be more productive". I think that's a mistaken approach. "Social" tools certainly can have value in an organisation, but there's nothing magic about a Facebook clone (or web-based IRC for that matter). Our position at Fogbeam is that ESN's (Enterprise Social Network), in order to provide real value, have to do more. That is, they have to connect with the things and ways that people actually get work done, and make it easier to find (information|people|documents|whatever) that you need to do something... in addition to the fluffier "idle chit chat" aspects. If an ESN can do that, then it can provide value. Of course, I'm biased, as that's one of the ways in which our ESN approach differs from some of the others. We have a tremendous focus on integration with other enterprise applications. And we use semantic web technology to do automatic semantic entity extraction from the text flowing around the system, so we can build a knowledge-base that helps people find related information. I'll be the first to say that a lot of companies have not received as much value from deploying internal social software as they might have expected. We just think it's (in part) because they used first generation social software that doesn't provided the needed capabilities. Another reason that companies fail to get a lot of value from this stuff is much harder to resolve: company culture and values. Simply put, some organisations will NEVER get much value from social software because the internal culture discourages collaboration, and encourages knowledge-hoarding, competition, backstabbing, secrecy and what-not. If Joe Manager at one of those firms puts in Yammer, or Jive, or Lotus Connections, or Fogcutter, or anything else, it's going to fail. In those cases, it has little or nothing to do with the technology. (Disclaimer: I'm totally biased, as my company makes "enterprise social software". Take everything I say with a grain of salt as you see fit.)