I’m always looking for interesting ways to look at Social Collaboration and best practices. John Brunswick has a post on exactly that. He notes the three principals of social collaboration. while my favorite is leverage a ubiquitous social fabric, his other points resonate……………especially if you want to cut down the silos he mentions in his first point. It’s a somewhat lengthy post that links to an even longer white paper so be sure to click through for more than this synopsis.
- Leverage a Ubiquitous Social Fabric – Collaborative activities should be supported through a ubiquitous social fabric, providing a personalized experience, broadcasting key business events and connecting people and business processes. This supports education of participants working in and around a specific business entity that will benefit from an implicit capture of tacit knowledge and provide continuity between participants. In the absence of this ubiquitous platform activities can still occur but are essentially siloed causing frequent duplication of effort across similar tasks, with critical tacit knowledge eluding capture.
- Supply Continuous Context to Support Decision Making and Problem Solving – People generally engage in collaborative behavior to obtain a decision or the resolution for a specific issue. The time to achieve resolution is referred to as “Solve Time”. Users have traditionally been forced to switch or “alt-tab” between business systems and synthesize their own context across disparate systems and processes. The constant loss of context forces end users to exert a large amount of effort that could be spent on higher value problem solving.
- Extend the Collaborative Lifecycle into Back Office – Beyond the solve time from decision making efforts, additional time is expended formalizing the resolution that was generated from collaboration in a system of record. Extending collaboration to result in the capture of an explicit decision maximizes efficiencies, creating a closed circuit for a particular thread. This type of structured action may exist today within your organization’s customer support system around opening, solving and closing support issues, but generally does not extend to Sales focused collaborative activities.
