Five Factors that Drive a Wedge Between Work and Social Media

Jive, Yammer, Chatter and other social enterprise platforms don’t seem to understand that social is no replacement for business process, business data and work context. Social is the style; work is the substance. Work must come first.

As a leader in work-social solutions that integrate social computing with business processes and data, Appian knows that the golden ticket for business value is not bringing external social media into the work place. It is bringing work into the realm of social technology. When work and social are tightly coupled, each improves the other. Social brings speed and participation to work; work brings context and accountability to social.

This slideshow highlights the five most common factors that prevent social business from delivering real and measurable business value, as identified by Appian.

Click through for five factors that drive a wedge between social enterprise platforms and business, as identified by Appian.

Enterprise social tools complicate business processes by accelerating communication without including needed business context. A Facebook-in-the-enterprise approach simply creates white noise through unfocused social feeds that offer little business value. Work-social puts work first, delivering social feeds  within a defined and actionable business context.

Social technologies support collaboration, but with significant limits; the actual work must be done in other IT applications. A work-social platform that is deeply integrated with business processes and systems delivers business events in real time and in a context from which employees can take immediate action.

Application silos are not new, but are on the rise again in social feeds that can’t capture and change business events, tasks and data.  Work-social stops silos by integrating social and the business process, reflecting how employees actually work.

Fast, collaborative action yields better business decisions – but only if business data is available to inform those decisions. What if a cross-functional team needs insight into sales data and product schedules? A true work-social platform drills into enterprise data from multiple systems and delivers the data that is relevant to collaboration.

Many of the “big name” enterprise social products can tell you about tasks, but don’t expect these products to enforce completion, or track and make changes to tasks. Too often, users have to exit the social feed to take action. When that happens, the risk of errors or omissions increases significantly.