Posts Tagged ‘Office Productivity’
The Business Gets Social: SalesForce’s Chatter and SAP’s StreamWork
Late in 2009 both SalesForce.com and SAP began beta testing social applications that proposed businesses could use social tools within their walls to address a variety of needs from financial management and sales tracking to impromptu group collaboration. Since then both of these solutions have gone live and are beginning to garner much interest in the Enterprise 2.0 communities.
The applications are Chatter and StreamWork, respectively. I blogged about StreamWork before as it occurred how in the business environment we use word processing tools less and less and depend more and more on our email to communicate ideas across departments, teams and amongst individuals.
I have also touched on the incorporation of business intelligence and search (here) and how these could automate the presentation of information in the context of what an individual, team or department is doing at any given time. I talked in my blog about how I saw the trifecta of business intelligence, search and collaboration tools adding previously untapped insight, thus value, to employees in a highly tailored, yet automated way.
Now I am seeing the productization of this in both Chatter (and Chatterbox by Financial Force.com) and StreamWork. Salesforce’s Chatter, “…which has been described by Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff as a way to make the cloud more collaborative and social.” adds another dimension to the companies AppExchange so much that the company created ChatterExchange a one stop shop for business grade collaborative tools that can plug-in to the many services and products that businesses are subscribing to from Salesforce.com.
SAP has positioned its self as a thought leader here by doing something completely un-SAP like. By first introducing StreamWork (nee 12Sprints) as a tool to aid in cross organization discussions, decision making and delivery toolkit for organization it took the emerging trends in social collaboration being tackled by the likes of Google Wave and Microsoft’s SharePoint 2010 and packaged them in context of a business application with integration into business processes.
While there are differences between the products, SAP stays closer to a collaboration tool that connects to popular email, content management and unified communications solutions while Saleforce.com’s Chatter leverages what it has learned from relationships with social media tools like Facebook and twitter. Both address the needs for robust, business grade solutions for collaboration, messaging and workflows. They both advance the enterprise from treating communications as transactional and promote relationships that unleash a community’s ability to work together in real time on topics of interest to bring business and customer value.
The exciting part is both of these tools are open to others to develop on top of and thus create a social network of their own for improvement in a very dynamic fashion. While is is not necessarily new of Salesforce.com, it certainly is not the business norm for SAP.
The potential value for using these applications may be tremendous for their customers who can now stay on top of internal and external events, opportunities and tipping points so that they can participate in conversations that previously they may have not even known were happening. Further by offering social tools in the context of the business they have potentially set their customers up to take advantage of that next big leap in productivity making them more competitive and more agile than other organizations.
StreamWork – Can SAP make Word Irrelevant?
Face it. How many of us use Word anymore?
We still use Excel and PowerPoint, but writing is seldom done in Word anymore. It’s done in email and on the web. We write, more often than not, to share ideas. Word has evolved into Outlook – or more realistically – the multitude of email applications and text editing software products have come crashing together. Combine this with the plethora of ‘free’ text editors, both on and off-line that do all the things we need to post (blog, publish and email) and share (email, tweet, and instant messaging) information in a one to many format, and the drive to use a text editor isolated from the web just doesn’t make sense.
What has sparked this change? After a bit of web research, it seems the amount of reading has continues to decrease while the amount we are exposed to increases. An interesting write up (but not the only one) on this can be found here . To summarize, people are addicted to information – the more the better. At the same time we have become woefully impatient readers and want ideas encapsulated into snippets we can re-tweet’ at will. We constantly search for a grand idea that adds value or validates our own and with any luck may help yet another person make a decision that creates more information (adding to the global conversation) for us to access and share in a never ending cycle.
But I digress, my point is that we write (via email, messenger, tweets, blogs, etc.) to share our ideas with others and solicit feedback. And technology is evolving to meet our needs. The rise in social media based is based partially on inability of email to keep up with how we communicate to larger and larger audiences. Micro-blogging services combined with social media (Facebook, Twitter, instant messenger clients, etc.) are supplanting our use of emails to communicate with friends, family and co-workers. Furthermore what writing we do is being augmented by multimedia (pictures, audio, and video) to become more interactive resulting in conversations that are more compelling to our audience. As such, this decade promises to take the preferred mode of communication in the digital age to the next level.
We have started to see products like Google’s Wave, IBM’s Lotus Live and Microsoft’s Office Live take form in an effort to make the sharing and collaborating of information and people more real-time. SAP, a world leader in structured business applications, seems to see an opportunity to provide its customers and the market with a solution for visually and graphically sharing what the other person is seeing, reading and conversing about. Nurturing the ability of many folks to generate and exchange ideas on a subject based on the information they are exposed to and expressing this to others in a means that are easier to follow.
SAP’s response to this model is interesting as they are the first large company that hails from a structured, data-centric world to offer a collaborative tool that is inherently based on the unstructured world of digital conversations. Their product, tentatively called StreamWork (nee 12 Sprints) , is very un-SAP in that 1) its free and 2) its build to be used across web-platforms like Evernote, Discussit, and more products without the use of propriety code or back office development.
In my opinion, the up-side for SAP and StreamWOrk is huge. First, people can start seeing SAP as more than just a company that provides core business applications, but also a partner that facilitates the conversations between employees, customers and partners. Second, StreamWork can bring value from the wealth of business and customer data locked in business applications, databases, and the web by creating a simple form factor for sharing ideas. Finally, by allowing people across an organization or ecosystem to collectively share their opinions new products and services can be brought to market and change/customer benefits accelerated.
Much like my experience trying Google’s Wave I am still waiting for people to ‘wave back’, yet given my experiences with other social tools (twitter, facebook, blogs, etc) I have no doubt that one day I will wonder why we had email (in much the same way I wonder why we ever used Fax machines). While I don’t think that alone SAP will make Word irrelevant, it is now part of a pack that together quickly is changing the way we communicate with one another. And it’s my opinion it’s better to be on that bus than not.
In closing, SAP is taking a big gamble on how its brand and services are perceived by the market in an effort to gain share in the collaborative market. But with great risks comes great reward.
Note: Updated 12Sprints to SAP’s official name “StreamWork” on March 23, 2010.
Resources:
http://sapstreamwork.com/
http://www.youtube.com/12sprints#p/
http://www.officelive.com/en-us/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaborative_software
