Socializing in the Digital World

An Ask the Expert feature with Open Text

Daniel Kraft, SVP of Corporate Strategy for Open Text, explains the value of social interaction for business.

“Organizations are expected to do more with less as they reduce head count during these recessionary times”
-Daniel Kraft, Open Text

People are the greatest corporate asset within an organization, and collectively they represent a tremendous portion of corporate memory and intellectual capital. Employees create, consume and share content every day with their colleagues as well as their business partners outside of the company, and the movement of content coincides with these standard business processes or business practices.

Communication re-engineering
Today we are experiencing a paradigm shift toward productivity. Organizations are expected to do more with less as they reduce headcount during these recessionary times. If companies are looking for efficiency gains with their ‘people and process’, communication cannot simply be automated (digitalized like email) but in fact would need to be re-engineered.

The goal of communication in a business context is to identify all the required information to make a decision using only the required resources. Automating the current process (e.g., adding search to email) is simply not sufficient. One limiting factor in communication lies within the isolated one-to-one communication processes that occur and the restriction in access. Most communication happens in a linear fashion, like sending an email to one or many people. They give feedback and may suggest or forward the email to another person, and in many cases I might not even have access to the right person because he or she is not known to me or is not even working in my organization. Beyond linear, people are now operating in a collaborative world outside the workplace and look to embrace that same environment within the organization that help them achieve better collaboration in their personal world. 

Digital coffee
Imagine a coffee house: you go in, get your coffee and get out. This is what email is doing to communication: you ask for information and you get information. Now imagine you enter the coffee place again: you wait in line; you start a conversation; and you find out that the person next to you has been working on a similar problem that you have to solve and is offering you support.

What just happened is typical offline social networking activity. Two people with the same interest (coffee) meet at a place they both like (coffee place) and they build a social network to share (knowledge). The goal now is to take this face-to-face experience into the digital world and build a social marketplace.

The social marketplace
Where individual knowledge was previously hidden, the social marketplace shares part of the corporate culture. Instead of asking one person via email a question, your question now proliferates among those within a related community (like the people in the coffee place). People who actively share their knowledge build their reputation and become recognized publicly as the experts (or even friends). As a result, organizations that encourage this type of community sharing build stronger peer-to-peer and community networks, which help accelerate productivity gains. Underlying contributions of these social communities include employee attraction and retention as part of human capital management, not to mention the enablement of a more virtual organization.

Organizations that see the value of social interaction with their external stakeholders can preserve market share, accelerate pipelines, cultivate customer loyalty and reduce the costs of frontline customer service. The social marketplace delivers fundamental values such as customer engagement and proactive peer-to-peer support and recommendations; development and solidification of communication and recommendation channels; the ability to spot and react to new opportunities for markets and prospecting; and community engagement with your brand to build loyalty and customer commitment.

We often talk about the potential of Enterprise 2.0, but what does that mean to an organization? Simply digitalizing communication is not the answer. Just as people are comfortable socializing around coffee, enabling your ecosystem to socialize in the digital world can be achieved – sometimes the solution is simply a good cup of coffee.