WHY

SOCIAL
COLLABORATION
ISTHE

FUTURE

BENEFITS
AND
USE CASES
Copyright 2015 eXo Platform

Introduction
Enterprise social networks will become the primary communication
channels for noticing, deciding or acting on information relevant to
carrying out work. - Research firm Gartner
You might not have noticed, but social collaboration is making inroads into all kinds of
organizations, from Fortune 500 giants to nimble startups. The trend is clear - we are moving from
two-way conversations towards collaborative communication.

Social tools are also starting to bring the information silos, created by different business systems
and various communication channels, together. CRM-systems, intranets and other corporate digital
tools used to be separate islands, rarely talking to each other. With social collaboration tools this is
beginning to change.

In this white paper we have collected the most commonly cited benefits of social collaboration and
spiced them up with links to cutting edge research and case studies. The focus is on highlighting
the solid business reasons why organizations adopt social tools.

Copyright 2015 eXo Platform

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Social collaboration boosts bottom

line through productivity gains

Pay is the single biggest cost for most organizations. Increasing productivity is a prime concern for
most senior executives - especially with knowledge workers. The problem is that the average
knowledge worker spends approximately 28 percent of their time managing e-mail and almost 20
percent looking for internal information or tracking down colleagues who can help with specific
tasks (see a report by McKinsey & Co). Email also slows down collaboration. Everybody has
experienced the confusion when different versions of the same document fly around from mailbox
to mailbox or when some people are kept in the loop and others arent.

Faster access to
expertise brings real
productivity gains
Social networks can significantly
reduce the time spent hunting
internal expertise. The does
anyone know question gets
answered in a fraction of the time
that it would via email. According
to a study by Nucleus Research
Inc, adding social capabilities to
CRM systems increases sales staff
productivity by an average of
11.8 percent. Customer queries are resolved faster, more accurately and with fewer staff.

Building a knowledge base - organically

When companies use social media internally, messages become content. This searchable record of
knowledge can, according to McKinsey & Co, reduce the time employees spend searching for
internal information by as much as 35 percent. This is a shift away from knowledge creation by
designated intranet editors, which results in woefully out of date intranets.

Copyright 2015 eXo Platform

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Bringing remote workers into

the fold
Today, teams are spread across the globe. Some
people work from home, some work on the move.
Remote and mobile work is here. Many managers
say the biggest challenge with remote workers is
maintaining consistently good communication.
Social tools lower the threshold for communication
- all those quick questions you wouldnt send via
email get a quick answer via collaboration tools.
Social tools are the next best thing to actually
sitting next to a colleague. And if you return from
your travels you really dont want to wade through
a sea of emails to get an idea of whats been going
on - you want to glance and get back to work as
quickly as possible.

Quick return on
investment
If you think about what even
a small productivity gain can
do in, say, a 100 people
department, with an annual
cost of 60K per employee
you start to realise the scale
of the opportunity. A 5%
productivity gain would
already save a quarter
million per year.

Increase top-line through more

effective collaboration

Understand the social network not as your new water cooler, but as your
new production line. - Ginni Rometty, CEO of IBM
The importance of collaboration in todays business world is self-evident. Staff deal with
increasingly complex problems which, according to many researchers, are better resolved by
groups than by individuals. Its worth remembering that information in itself is not valuable - the
insights the information helps bring about are. And insights dont usually happen in silos - they
happen when information, and people, interact.
No wonder organizations invest a lot of money in their various business collaboration tools - CRMs,
ERPs, etc. The problem is these numerous applications, used by different teams within the same
company, create their own information silos and prevent rather than promote collaboration.

Copyright 2015 eXo Platform

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Social tools can act as a bridge between different in-house and

third-party applications
Integrating disparate collaboration tools into a
social collaboration platform is a great way to
unify a companys systems. Social collaboration
can act as a glue that binds different systems
and people together.
An ad-hoc collaboration project on a big lead
might include people from sales, service
delivery, marketing, an employee who has
worked for the potential client in the past and
knows their internal culture and an external
expert from the client industry.
People can collaborate within the context of the
software they use most frequently at work.
The project social stream provides a summary of
what is happening in the different systems notifications from a CRM can, for example, feed
the social stream in a group devoted to a client
project. No need to flip between different
programs and copy and paste content from one
place to another.
Discussions are easy to follow and participate in, as everyones social activity stream provides an
overview of all projects the person is involved in.

Social collaboration tools are perfect for cross-team

collaboration
Todays business challenges often involve multiple teams and skills, while companies are organized
in silos and often their IT systems follow this organization. Marketing and sales teams often use
different software for instance, creating an invisible barrier for information flow.
Social tools provide a perfect way to link the systems together - sales and marketing can create a
common project around an activity stream that would be populated from the separate systems
they use.
According to a white paper by IBM, the business processes currently benefiting from this type of
integration the most are customer service, product development, human resources, marketing and
Copyright 2015 eXo Platform

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sales. According to respondents to an IBM survey in 2012, 60% of companies will socially-enable
their sales processes in the next two years and 54% expect to support their customer service
processes with social capabilities. In the future we are likely to see even more fields and functions
that integrate social to work processes. This in turn will lead organizations to re-engineer some of
the processes to better fit a more social way of doing things.

Cross-team collaboration = happier clients

The most successful companies have one thing in common - they place client
satisfaction at the heart of their processes - this means crossing team and
departmental boundaries. For most companies this is a big challenge - how do you
address a project that does not belong to any particular team? How does finance
know if the delivery has been made? How do account managers know how the
delivery went?
With social collaboration integrated in the company processes and systems, the
solution can be as simple as a dedicated group on the collaboration platform.
Relevant people from sales, delivery, finance and customer support should all be
part of the group. Instead of having to manually update everything, the activity
stream would pull in information from relevant team tools. No more learning about
delivery issues from the client and chasing down the delivery guy to see what is
going on.

Beat your competition through

innovation

Innovation happens at the intersections - Valdis Krebs, leading expert in

social network theory

Innovation is increasing in importance. Companies that concentrate on keeping the wheels in

motion without actively innovating are in the danger of suffering the fate of Kodak and Nokia. Few
companies are safe in these turbulent times: the life expectancy of firms in the Fortune 500 has
declined from 75 years half a century ago to less than 15 years.

Copyright 2015 eXo Platform

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Empower individual innovation through social tools

Social tools are an important
component in helping organizations
innovate because they empower
anyone to share and develop ideas.
According to The Institute for
Corporate
Productivity
(i4cp)
te c h n o l o g y - e n a b l e d
collaboration/social business tools
are essential in building an
innovative workforce.

Foster innovation by
enabling company
wide interaction
This is an important shift in the way
innovative ideas are generated and
developed. There is a whole science
behind the new approach: social
network theory argues that when you
are looking for new information you
are often better off exploring the
weaker links in your social network
because your closest colleagues are
likely to know the same things you
know. This is referred to as the
strength of weak ties. Its also widely
argued that new ideas are born when
different worlds meet - for example
when frontline sales person talks to
someone in product development or
IT. People with similar backgrounds
often come up with very similar
solutions. Your innovation team might
not be that innovative after all.

Copyright 2015 eXo Platform

Get ideas from

unexpected sources
Frontline staff for example are often
excellent sources for product ideas and
tweaks, but are routinely forgotten in
the product development process.
Imagine an activity stream that alerts
frontline sales person on a new product
in development that is aimed at a
customer segment she knows well: she
can now chip in with an idea that the
product team would not have been able
to come up with because they dont
interact with the target audience on a
daily basis.

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Build an ideation engine through crowdsourcing

Of course social collaboration tools alone wont turn your company into an innovation powerhouse.
You need to purposefully create cross-functional teams and have processes in place on how you
source and develop ideas. Some organizations have, for example, internal community managers
who facilitate serendipitous encounters (serendipity is often a key ingredient in innovation), others
have built whole platforms and processes that enable staff to come up with innovative ideas. IBM
for example have created an in-house crowdsourcing platform so that they ensure they utilise all
the knowledge and creativity in the company.

Build a strong corporate culture by

engaging employees

To win in the marketplace you must first win in the workplace. - Doug

Conant, Former CEO of Campbells Soup

Work has become more difficult. According to Gartner, sixty percent of US jobs today involve
non-routine work, up from 40% in 1975. This leads to cognitive overload which is one major reason
why people dislike their work and actively disengage from it. Another major reason for
disengagement is that employees have no say over their jobs and what is happening in the
organization. When you are not able to make a meaningful contribution, you disengage.

Social collaboration makes people more engaged

Successful social collaboration
helps people cope with todays
demanding workplace by
getting help from colleagues
when needed. It also plays an
important role in bringing
back a feeling of personal
control and connection to the
company.
Deutsche Telekom, Europes
biggest telecommunications

Copyright 2015 eXo Platform

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company, is a good example of how powerful an effect social tools can have on corporate culture
and staff engagement. The company introduced a social forecasting and crowdsourcing tool to tap
into the expertise of their employees to learn about customer needs, competition and market
trends. They got that and much more: the employees started to discuss the companys decisions,
products, and goals among themselves. So in addition to market intelligence they managed to
increase overall employee motivation and engagement.

Social tools make top-down communication more effective

Traditional top-down communication is easy to ignore - it just sleeps in the corner of ones screen or
archived emails. A social intranet, on the other hand, enables managers to have two-way
conversations with their staff - a communication message can be posted, reshared and discussed.
This not only helps to get messages across better, but also helps build trust and make employees
feel more engaged in whats happening in the organization.

Social tools can help build strong corporate culture

Corporate culture consists of the (often)
unspoken rules of how things are done in the
company. Together with official processes and
systems it forms the software that guides how
people in the company work.
Company culture is built and reinforced
whenever people interact - occasional top-down
messages from the CEO or vision statements do
very little to build corporate culture.
To actively build organizational culture you need
key people to model the right kind of behaviour.
Social tools in turn can play an important role in
amplifying these behaviors. If the aim is for
example to get employees to openly ask for help
when they are stuck (which can be difficult if the
company culture has been about pretending you
know everything), a thumbs up or a positive
comment from a senior manager on the company
social network not only sends a message to the
employee that he did the right thing, but also
shows other employees that its perfectly ok to
show that you dont know answers to all the
questions.
Copyright 2015 eXo Platform

Disengagement is a
costly problem
Disengagement is a serious
economic issue and a costly
problem
to
most
organizations. The Bureau of
National Affairs in the US
estimates American businesses
lose $11 billion annually due to
employee turnover. Engaged
employees, on the other hand,
drive profit. Employees who
care about their work offer
better service and are more
productive, which in turn
affects the whole business all
the way up to higher
shareholder returns.

09

Lower training costs by capturing

silent knowledge

"If only HP knew what HP knows, we'd be three times more productive." Lew Platt, former CEO of Hewlett-Packard
One of the most important assets companies have is the knowhow and expertise that employees
accumulate over years. Capturing this elusive silent knowledge has been a painful problem for
many organizations for decades. When an employee leaves, that valuable knowledge is gone as
well. It means the organization might lose critical insights and reinvent the wheel again and again.
Senior managers everywhere have spent countless hours on knowledge management strategies
and spent millions of dollars on software to address this painful problem but often with not much
success.
Enter
social
knowledge
management. With social tools
capturing
elusive
human
expertise becomes a lot easier - a
far cry from having to constantly
update a database for example.
Instead of having to make
knowledge capturing an extra
task, it happens automatically
because discussions are being
recorded as they happen. From
knowledge
capturing
and
management perspective this
process
where
knowledge
almost effortlessly gets turned into content is a big step forward. And when there is enough
content like this in the network the search function makes it all discoverable.
Modern social solutions increasingly include peer review tools like voting which enable users to
evaluate the quality of the information available. Onboarding new employees are facilitated. A
good illustration on the evolution of knowledge management is Xerox and its tech reps. Xerox
initially spent a lot of money to train their tech reps in classrooms, only to later realize that a
collaborative social network with peer review capabilities is the most cost effective way to capture
knowledge and train staff.

Copyright 2015 eXo Platform

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Does anyone know?

In the old days, firms whose success was knowledge dependent such as
consulting firms or investment banks, encouraged group wide emails with
does anyone know questions. The same questions were asked over and
over as the answer would go to just one person. With social tools, this
question would get a response from a knowledgeable network of experts
that would become instant and searchable content, available to all at any
future date through a search function.

Social collaboration is the future

Social collaborations tools in enterprise are not only a networking place, they help
companies reach their business goals through a number of different routes, making
them quicker to react to changes in the external environment and more effective in
using their most powerful assets.
As a consequence, social tools are becoming mainstream as an increasing number of
companies adopt them. In the future, social collaboration will undoubtedly drive
most organizations not as just another communication channel but as part of their
nervous system.
The quicker your company starts the collaborative shift, the more ahead of
competition it will be in todays rapidly changing world.

Copyright 2015 eXo Platform

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Research and references

1. https://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/global/files/nz__en_uk__telecom__gbe03121_usen_socialnetwork.pdf
2. http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/organization/boosting_the_productivity_of_knowledge_workers
3. http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/high_tech_telecoms_internet/the_social_economy
4. http://nucleusresearch.com/press/social-crm-and-mobile-capabilities-boost-productivity-by-26-4-percent-nucleus-research-finds/
5. http://www.businessgoessocial.net/2014/09/23/esko-kilpi-on-how-the-world-of-work-is-changing-infographic/
6. https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/files/form/anonymous/api/library/7761166c-b1c8-4afb-92ca-65bcf271caaa/docu
ment/ff6390f6-a107-4b51-919d-56d231e78d24/media/patterns
7. http://adigaskell.org/2014/05/27/the-crucial-role-process-innovation-plays-in-social-business/
8. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/b2ef363c-31c4-11e4-b377-00144feabdc0.html#axzz3DMhCXUle
9. http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2012/01/25/shift-index-2011-the-most-important-business-study-ever/
10. http://adigaskell.org/2013/04/03/what-can-your-organisation-do-to-be-more-innovative/
11. http://www.soc.ucsb.edu/faculty/friedkin/Syllabi/Soc148/Granovetter%201983.pdf
12. http://www.orgnet.com/innovation.html
13. http://fortune.com/2013/12/04/how-ibm-bypasses-bureaucratic-purgatory/
14. http://www.forbes.com/sites/victorlipman/2012/12/14/study-explores-drivers-of-employee-engagement/
15. http://www.forbes.com/sites/kevinkruse/2012/06/22/employee-engagement-what-and-why/
16. http://www.crowdsourcing.org/editorial/deutsche-telekoms-internal-crowdsourcing/27131
17. http://www.employees-lawyer.com/two-way-communication-organizational-trust/
18. http://smallbusiness.chron.com/behavior-modeling-workplace-10980.html
19. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_knowledge_management
20. http://www.slideshare.net/BusinessGoesSocial/xerox-story-working-out-loud

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