With the success of social networking websites like facebook, twitter and linkedin it became apparent that these sites indeed help people to stay in touch, get connected, share knowledge and do lot of more stuffs. But even after their enormous success people were reluctant to use similar technologies at the workplace for fear of losing control and promoting social culture in the company. But changing times and behavior of people due to the use of social networking websites eventually business started using this enterprise social network at workplace.
Some of the success stories of enterprise social network include Yammer, Jive, IBM, Socialtext and many more. All these products have basic premises of connecting, sharing and communicating to colleagues, customers and partners at the workplace. Social collaborative platform helps to find information quickly, engage with others over useful discussion, create groups and share and consume information. The days for conventional way of running businesses are numbered. People want an open platform which will help them to easily connect with the experts and get information regarding specific subjects. The recent Mckinsey report says that use of social collaboration technology at workplace can improve the productivity of their employees by 20-25 percent. It also says that the communication among employees have improved twice when compared to the use of other technologies.
Since this social collaboration platform can be integrated with custom built applications it can used to carry out many business important applications. Coming years will see a huge surge in companies adopting social collaboration technologies at their workplace. Currently companies are offering this as a SAAS and on-premise offering business can chose as per their requirements. This technology will also help companies to carry their business on the go while the move. As this platforms are available for mobile and tablet devices and also one can access it through mobile apps. Impact of such tool in the use of HR, R&D, Sales, and Marketing is immense like increase of speed to access knowledge, seamless communication, and improved collaboration among employees.