Often lauded as the starting point of people’s day, typical corporate intranets have been perpetually disappointing, never really living up to businesses’ expectations. Newer social intranets — while somewhat better — are just as often homogeneous, monolithic software stacks locked into one vendor’s view of the world.
So how do companies provide the kind of modern workspace that will increase employee efficiency and productivity? The following are 4 minimum tenets of a modern, effective enterprise social networking platform:
1. An open, agnostic architecture.
Even in 2014, there are still companies pushing a “their way or the highway” business model. Yet companies need to think holistically about how to make an Enterprise Social Network a successful work tool. An ESN shouldn’t care where your data lives, so insisting on one particular development framework, or pushing cloud-only versus on-premises ignores all the nuances in between the two. And sure, open web standards and RESTful APIs go a long way towards making a single-vendor approach sound appealing, but the reality is, the APIs alone won’t work — companies also need a strong integration framework that can incorporate custom business processes.
2. A broad, business process platform.
To make your ESN a place where people get work done, it isn’t enough to pull events into a feed via a REST API or integrate over OpenSocial. People need to be able to execute business processes right from within their workspace so they don’t have to keep toggling off to another application. True integration with apps like Salesforce, SharePoint, SAP, Box, and others means being bi-directional — for example, if my Oracle Expenses system sends a report into my activity feed, I should be able to view/approve it right there. Without those business process capabilities, your employee’s incentive and motivation to use the workspace quickly wanes.
3. A cross-platform, multifunctional mobile app.
As history has repeatedly taught us, nothing reduces workplace productivity more than bad tools. That’s why the award-winning tibbr Mobile app was designed from the ground up to get work done quickly — to communicate, collaborate, ideate, view/share files, integrate business apps, and more — all in a simple, easy-to-use interface. By streamlining and focusing the day’s work onto a single pane of glass, tibbr Mobile simplifies and prioritizes people’s work lives, making them more productive.
4. All-encompassing context and relevancy.
For a workspace to be truly effective, everything — from content to people to data — must be tied to a particular Subject or other top-level hierarchy for two reasons: 1.) To increase people’s chances of finding what they’re looking for, or 2.) To give people a real-time mechanism to filter the information coming at them. The speed of information affects relevancy, too, because both become stale quickly in fast-moving industries. A good workspace loops files from any system or cloud. It aggregates ideas to spur company innovation. And it puts rich, publishing tools right at employees’ fingertips, so they have the power to update and keep information fresh on the fly.
The workplace for a 21st Century workforce.
Today’s next-gen enterprise social network, tibbr, is the 21st Century workspace companies have been waiting for. As a social networking platform, it’s a heterogeneous environment integrating multiple systems from different vendors across your entire company. tibbr is app-agnostic, integrates broadly, has an award-winning mobile app, and makes knowledge management easy with subjects.
Clearly, there are many more factors to consider before choosing an Enterprise Social Network platform, but you can find out more about them by getting a free trial of the tibbr platform here.
