Three Areas I’d Like To See Improved In Social Business Software
November 20 2012 04:00:00 PM
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I spend a great deal of time advising software vendors ranging from stealth startups to the world's largest enterprise software companies. While I am optimistic about many of the innovations I see coming, I'm also troubled by some of the recurring themes.
The slides embedded below are from the presentation I gave at the excellent Defrag 2012 conference. They highlight three of the areas I would like to see software vendors improve upon. It's a bit hard to follow without me narrating, but here are the general themes:
1. Activity Streams have great potential, but they need to become much more manageable. Slides 3-8 highlight some of the issues with just throwing everything into the stream. Slides 9-13 cover some of the ways to reduce the clutter and enable people to focus on the information relevant and/or important to them. The methods range from better manual filters (which few people use) to automated filtering of streams based on the context of what you're working on.
2. People are ego-centric, tools should provide a way for them to focus on content from their point of view. With all the hype around social, community and sharing... many vendors have strayed away from making it easy for people to find their own content. Files they created. Comments they made. Tasks they have to do. Slides 14-17 talk about making it easier for people to work in a a "me" centric manner, or what I call 'Don't forget the Me in social media."
3. Analytics should focus on helping make decisions, not just show pretty pictures. The point I make during slides 18-19 is that many vendors use analytics as eye candy. They show splashy graphs, leader boards and top ten lists. The problem is, that type of information rarely helps people get their jobs done. The next generation of analytics needs to provide more contextual relevance, helping people access the content, colleagues and communities that can help them make decisions faster and more accurately.
What areas would you like to see improved in the tools you use at your job?
The slides embedded below are from the presentation I gave at the excellent Defrag 2012 conference. They highlight three of the areas I would like to see software vendors improve upon. It's a bit hard to follow without me narrating, but here are the general themes:
1. Activity Streams have great potential, but they need to become much more manageable. Slides 3-8 highlight some of the issues with just throwing everything into the stream. Slides 9-13 cover some of the ways to reduce the clutter and enable people to focus on the information relevant and/or important to them. The methods range from better manual filters (which few people use) to automated filtering of streams based on the context of what you're working on.
2. People are ego-centric, tools should provide a way for them to focus on content from their point of view. With all the hype around social, community and sharing... many vendors have strayed away from making it easy for people to find their own content. Files they created. Comments they made. Tasks they have to do. Slides 14-17 talk about making it easier for people to work in a a "me" centric manner, or what I call 'Don't forget the Me in social media."
3. Analytics should focus on helping make decisions, not just show pretty pictures. The point I make during slides 18-19 is that many vendors use analytics as eye candy. They show splashy graphs, leader boards and top ten lists. The problem is, that type of information rarely helps people get their jobs done. The next generation of analytics needs to provide more contextual relevance, helping people access the content, colleagues and communities that can help them make decisions faster and more accurately.
What areas would you like to see improved in the tools you use at your job?
Hi Alan,
Excellent presentation. Hilarious, yet very insightful and on point. I couldn't pass up the opportunity to show you how tibbr has been/is addressing your exact ESN concerns.. In short:
tibbr was named a leader in activity streams by Forrester Research. The recently announced tibbr 4 is completely focused on the user with enhanced social profiles and social graphs. Lastly, tibbr 4 boasts very powerful insights. Each of these points are explained in detail at tibbr.com/blog
The 4th area is some form of interoperability between enterprise social networks. We never solved this issue with previous generations of web-based collaboration tools, but ESN vendors can't compete long term using the same model as Twitter or Facebook as it will ultimately limit them. This does relate to point 2, but deserves to be called out as a specific challenge.
@James, yes ESNs are silos. Ironic considering the marketing message each vendor is pitching. There are several stream aggregation vendors (startups) out there now that are trying to help this, but it's a band-aide, not a solution.
Alan - Great points all around. Focusing on what's important is more important than just what's happening. That's why we have Dashboards in TeamPage at multiple levels, and why the activity feed has a convenient "mine" filter as well as other filters on content type (articles, tasks, events...). I use this all the time to get back to what I wrote in a space.
Hey Jordan, thanks for the comments. It's hard to tell just based on the slides, but my hope is that vendors will start to create intelligent streams that automatically adjust the content based on things like context, time, agenda, tasks, social graph, etc.
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