Image via CrunchBaseFrom an interview of Jay Pullur, CEO of Qontext in today's HinduIs there a maturity map of enterprise social networking that you would like to describe? Are there low-hanging fruits that should be pursued first?
The maturity model for enterprise social networking can be understood to be at three levels, based on how widespread the usage is and hence the impact it has on the organisation.
1) Engagement: The social platform serves as an employee engagement platform, replacing more conventional intranet or portals within the enterprise. Intranets have moved from static to dynamic with the backing of content management systems and portal software, but still need IT staff to keep them up-to-date and are not end-user managed. A social platform now serves as a ‘social intranet,' where everyone is both a creator and consumer of content.
Such social intranet provides the low-hanging fruits for enterprises; this is easy to implement (needs no process changes), and improvement in internal communication is perceptible. It also builds a culture of sharing information in the organisation.
2) Collaboration: Social platform acts as the backbone of most collaboration and communication activities in the enterprise, taking the place of email-based document exchanges. A significant business benefit of this would be reduction in information silos (inboxes were always private and non-sharable), and email overload (through social design and information self-service).
3) Process improvement: At the highest level of usage, the social platform supplements enterprise applications with collaboration capabilities to facilitate people-driven parts of the process. The association of data and transaction records with communication and content items will help in decision-making, exception-handling, and work coordination.
Enterprise social platforms, such as Qontext, can be implemented within organisations that plan to use the same at any of the three levels above.
