Blog
Contact UsHave you ever had an experience where you see a new product and think, “I wish I would have thought of that.” This tends to happen when we see something that is so simple and so obvious, yet so remarkably useful that we can’t imagine how we got along with out it. Leonardo da Vinci said, “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” There is a lot of truth in that.
I had this experience about a year ago when I was first exposed to salesforce.com’s new Chatter product. Chatter is a social networking mechanism within salesforce.com that allows for powerful collaboration among the users of a salesforce instance. That is the simplicity, but the power and the implications are transformational.
Salesforce.com has a long history of taking the simplicity of the consumer web (e.g. eBay, Amazon, Google) and brining it to business. I heard a question posed years ago that asked “why is it that we have so many web-based tools that we can so easily use in our personal life, but when we go to work we are saddled with 10 year old technology?” Well, salesforce.com and other cloud computing vendors have addressed that issue by building intuitive, easily modifiable products that are capable enough to meet the needs of complex businesses. Chatter is the latest example of leveraging interactions akin to those of Twitter and Facebook, and applying the paradigm to business productivity. Brilliant!
As we look at how enterprises generally build their systems, they start with process. Process defines the tasks, decision points, inputs and outputs that an organization follows to get things done. Process provides structure and predictability, but is it really how things get done? What about informal conversations, one off ideas, and word of mouth? Don’t these things play a part in how things get done? Doesn’t productivity sometimes depend on whom you know rather than what you know?
The answer to these questions has generally been to initiate more process. If you have an interaction with a colleague or customer that you deem important, there must be a process to log that activity, develop a call report, or record an event. Problem solved. Or is it? Does anyone in your organization refer to the process manual every time they go to complete a task? What if there is no formal process?
The fact is that we need structure, but everything that we do cannot be dictated by structure or process. The conversations that occur within your organization aggregate to define the pulse of the company. How can we define a process that captures these conversations to make them useful? How do we get visibility and obtain real collaboration in a way that isn’t defined by process, but leverages the way that people naturally communicate? CHATTER!
Chatter allows organizations the ability to stop fighting the uphill battle of distilling unstructured data into information that can be readily understood. Instead, it allows for the free flow of real information in the form that is most consumable by the people that matter…your employees. It enables the “conversation” and the “pulse” of a company to be shared across geographies, across business functions, and across personal relationships without the need to run reports or do some other heavy analysis.
The value proposition around Chatter has only begun to be realized, but we can take a peek at the potential by looking at the likes of our companions in the consumer web space like Facebook, Twitter, and Yelp. Social interaction is how business gets done, and now we have a technology that allows everybody’s voice to heard.
Tags: chatter, salesforce.com