Three Ways Social Tools Can Help You Work Smarter

By Jeff Schick, IBM
We’re a collaboration nation. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest. All of these Internet phenomenons are powered by our urge to share, riff and create together.

Which is exactly why the disconnect between our work and social lives is so striking. Outside of work, we collaborate up a storm. Social media tops the list of what we do as consumers online. Some 94 percent of people use social tools to learn, 78 percent to share knowledge, and 49 percent to engage with experts. Yet, within the walls of our offices, creative collaboration isn’t yet mainstream. Email still outpaces social interaction by a ratio of 10 to 1 with an estimated 108 billion work emails sent each day — only 14 percent of which are considered to be critical in nature.

That, however, is changing with cloud, analytics and mobile leading the charge. The benefits of social are many, yet the email albatross remains. A growing desire exists for elegant tools that can be used at work, which mirror the slick experiences we have in our personal lives. Together, these technologies create a potent platform for collaboration, reshaping not just the tools we rely on but our entire work experience, from email to instant messaging to engaging on social networks.

Three Ways Social Tools Can Help You Work Smarter

In fact, today IBM has introduced a first-of-its-kind social mail offering that combines these technologies to help employees focus on their most important tasks, find information fast and collaborate quickly to get work done. The solution marks the emergence of a new class of social collaboration software that goes far beyond the corporate in box to transform the way we work.

By delivering integrated email, social and analytic capabilities through a single,secure and intuitive user interface, IBM Verse gives employees an intelligent “at-a-glance” view that surfaces their most critical actions as well as information about the people requesting them and a thirst for such tools, but without the intrusion of mining your data for marketing purposes.

We’re already seeing how weaving cloud, social, mobile and analytics into internal operations creates new competitive advantages. Companies are using these technologies to bring people back to the center of business. For instance, some businesses are applying analytics to internal social networks to pinpoint hidden pockets of expertise and high-performing units. That way, employees know exactly where to turn for help on projects or with clients, helping increase productivity 25 percent, according to IBM’s “Applying Social Business” study.

The goal is deceptively simple. Create a smarter workforce through collaboration. Use the rapid advancements in cloud, analytics and social technologies to connect in new ways. Build competitive agility into the organization through the cloud so employees, partners, and customers can engage, collaborate and innovate.

In the collaborative enterprise, and illustrated by new offerings such as IBM Verse, business processes will be turned into a seamless collaboration experience tailored to specific tasks, constantly updated with new, pertinent information and social network data. Employees won’t worry about keeping up with their email. Built-in analytics will comb through their tasks and social contacts, prioritizing requests based on their unique interests and behaviors, providing helpful information and internal expertise, and helping them focus on the most important actions of the day. And doing so in a way that isn’t using individual personal data to market or sell products to individuals, but rather to help people work smarter.

Crucial innovations. All aimed squarely at transforming business from the inside out. So how strategically do you go about accomplishing these goals? Here are three things to consider:

1. Connect “me” to “we” to provide value: The cloud, analytics and social technologies are helping us uncover and connect to new ideas and expertise inside and outside our organizations. But so much information is being created that it’s hard to separate actionable insights from business chatter. Analytics capabilities let us work smarter and sift out the key information coming from different sources to get it into the right hands internally. Analytics helps us reinvent the disciple of human capital management by using data-driven insights to identify, attract, motivate and retain talented employees.

2. Less clutter, more clarity: Focus your energy on generating innovation where and when it happens — inside and outside the organization and from the top to the bottom. Gather, prioritize and harness information not based on its origin, but on its potential impact on the business. Don’t just roll out collaboration communities. Think about how to integrate collaborative networking, knowledge management, social learning tools, and expertise locators into your business processes in order to harness the collective intelligence of a workforce.

3. Focus on people-centric engagements while limiting risk: The trick to driving open collaboration is to do it in a way that allows employees to focus on the right content, conversations and actions at the right time without opening up new privacy risks. The key is preparation. You have to plan for how you will intelligently control boundaries and be proactive in creating privacy, security, and compliance policies. So you can build from the ground up a customizable and flexible platform that includes the network of people you rely on to generate ideas, but that also limits and monitors risks.

Collaboration will help the employees and companies build new skills, work more closely and better together, and make smarter, data-driven decisions more quickly. Mobile and analytics will put the power of the collective intelligence of a corporation in the hands of every employee.