It’s no secret social media tools that enhance enterprise collaboration are quickly becoming all the rage in the business world. In fact, a recent report by Forrester suggests businesses will increase their spending on enterprise social media software at a rate of 61%, compounded annually.
Businesses should be excited because enterprise social software does enhance organizational productivity, and ultimately, the bottom line. The challenge, however, lies in accurately measuring those results and then communicating them to management and upper-level executives.
At this point, however, there is not one standard method of measuring the effectiveness of enterprise collaboration tools. The results of a study performed by McKinsey, summarized here, provide some insights as to how you might make necessary measurements.
For organizations implementing Web 2.0 technologies, the following is true:
- 77% gain faster access to information
- 60% reduce their communication costs
- 52% gain enhanced access to internal experts
- 44% cut their travel costs
- 41% experience increased employee satisfaction
If you wanted to study access to information, for example, you would simply measure how much time it takes to locate information before and after implementation of your enterprise social network. Tie this amount of time to the dollars spent on salaries of the respective employees using this time, and voila – you now have an accurate measure of the reduction in cost your social network brings.
The Extensive Benefits of Collaboration
When speaking about collaboration, you should remember that the more collaboration your organization has, the better. This post summarizes detail clearly demonstrating collaboration made a greater impact on measured areas such as profitability, labor productivity, customer satisfaction, and innovation, than the type of strategy employed and conditions of the market.
Enterprise collaboration software strongly facilitates organizational collaboration. Now that you have a better idea of how to measure the effectiveness and the additional benefits of this tool, consider how substantial the impact may be for your organization.
