As some of you know, I have been working in the field of Web and Enterprise Content Management for many years. To date, I am still involved in ECM – , Web – and Enterprise 2.0 (#E20, aka Social Business #SocBiz) – projects. And I am still following all developments in terms of new technologies and the change in the daily workflows of the digital workplace.
A lot of people are writing and talking about Social Media, Social Software, Social Business and Enterprise 2.0. A vast majority of them is only interested in facebook, twitter, instagram and so on. This field describes only a very small, and rather end-user orientated field of the new technologies I am talking about.
An interesting aspect which is often forgotten is, that new platforms like Igloo, Jive, Confluence, Chatter and Yammer are not there to help your employees chat with each others but to help them to do their daily work and to support their daily workflows.
How are you doing with documents, emails, instant messaging, cloud computing, mobile devices and so on in your projects, in collaboration with your customers, in your marketing department and within the processes of your backoffice?
I have written a whole book about how these new technologies can support business process management on a meta level. And, these new technologies can support a lot of your and your employees work every day, any place, any device and on any operating system.
#E20 will help you to handle the whole life cycle of information, of documents, of instant messages, of any content and of your daily workflows and processes, as some, example-given “high-level” use-cases can illustrate (just examples):
- Gather and structure content or expertise (e.g. an expert about X) within one platform in your daily processes
- Enhance content and other elements when working on a daily workflow (e.g., recommend an element or just give a statement and tell your colleagues about its / his / her qualities)
- Find and use content or just get help when doing X (“just” find your content / element or colleague within one intelligent search, some people call this “enterprise search”…)
Please remember: Your employees want everything in one place, unhindered information flows, an integrated user interface which provides real user experience when doing their daily work. They do not want additional effort every day. Make it as easy as possible. Nobody needs a social platform which is not used.
Enterprise 2.0 is not about trends or about waste of time. It’s about how new technologies can help your employees solve problems, to find answers for their problems and to support their daily tasks at work. And it is not a discussion about technologies, there is not the one, single concept for all.
Please let me know if you like my statement or feel free to contact me if you need help in your special context. I also recommend the article “aperto – A framework to introduce Corporate Social Software / Social Business Software” which helps you to evaluate and implement new technologies in your company.