(This post is Part 1 in a two-part series. For Part 2, click here.)
Let’s continue our tour around the social capabilities of SharePoint 2013 and its extensions with a look at the value of analytics and why they need to matter to the decision-makers—whether they’re in IT, Communications, Human Resources or some other function— who are buying enterprise social software.
By “analytics” I don’t mean people who tend toward quantitative versus qualitative judgments (although we certainly have enough of those in the SharePoint community). No, in this case I’m referring to the collected data—and the art of reading patterns in it—that allows social software providers and their clients to make informed, reasoned judgments about:
- Who is using the software?
- How is their social software being used?
- What are they using social software for?
When administrators and, even better, the software developers themselves can collect and create reports on this data, they can target the tools to be far more effective within different demographics. An entire enterprise, a business unit, a division, a department, even a team—all may have different usage patterns that can be tracked and analyzed in order to improve the tool’s business value.
Why Do Analytics Matter?
On the one hand, the answer to that should be pretty self-evident by this point in the post. If, for example, you can tell that IT personnel are using microblogging features heavily and saving time and stress on the email system, but IT Managers and Directors aren’t using the tools at all, you have a case to make to IT management about how a simple behavioral change can positively impact not only their productivity but also the storage costs of an important system.
On the other hand, the value of analytics in social software goes well deeper than simple in-house analysis. Cloud-based social software allows not only for the case above, but also for engineers in the actual software development firm to track what functions are being used, and how.
They can then tailor the next release to speak directly to things users need—whether it’s streamlining an existing feature, predictively surfacing data from common search queries, or supplying altogether new functionality based on user behavior with the current tools.
Facebook and LinkedIn do this already, but from an enterprise perspective, the upshot of this is actually quite groundbreaking. Previously, the enterprise software industry was bound to tortoise-like three-year release cycles—an unfortunate circumstance that has typically found business software lagging far behind the internet platforms employees are used to in their private lives.
Clearly, cloud-based social platforms have a lot to offer. But what does that mean for SharePoint? Sounds like another blog post is in order….
