A decade back people never thought that social media can play such a huge role in their everyday lives. Similarly in enterprise sector CIOs and higher management executives are still skeptical about using the enterprise social network in their organization and question its exact nature of ROI. Those who do not implement social network for businesses will be left behind in this fiercely competitive world. Enterprise social collaboration software is not the usual social media platform that you come across every day. It is much more than that it offers seamless networking capabilities across the organization along with sharing of information and integration of productive tools to carry out everyday business work.
Today most of the companies in India is waking up to the fact that enterprise social network can indeed make a difference to everyday productive and bring about acceleration in the growth of business. Their thoughts are echoed by research firms like IDC, Gartner and Mckinsey. Sensing a need for ESN many small and large players are into the foray of getting a good market share out of it. Though there is indeed huge demand for this kind of software but it is a latent need. Companies like Oracle have Oracle Fusion CRM and Oracle Fusion HCM, IBM have ESN known as connections, recent purchase of yammer by Microsoft and socialtext by Vmware is testimony to the growing need of ESN.
Many Indian companies have their own ESN to facilitate collaboration and knowledge sharing. L&T Infotech is an early adopter of ESN they have this CliquePoint which is based on Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010. The company derives couple of benefits form it the first benefits include decrease in the dependency on e-mails, and secondly improved efficiency of drafting Request for Proposals (RFPs). L&T Infotech has improved its employee work efficiency through the use of this ESN. Other companies like Cognizant use Cognizant 2.0 or C2 an ESN platform that offers improved knowledge management and team collaboration. Rajashree Natarajan Vice President, Knowledge Management, Cognizant says that “There was 15 percent improvement in productivity in projects….. Also, there was 8 percent improvement in the ability to deliver projects on time and 7 percent improvement in the ability to deliver on-budget”. This is in accordance with recent findings on ESN. Persistent Systems, a product outsourcing company, uses Persistent Social to fulfill the need for ESN, the company chose to go with Cisco WebEx Social that offers social networking along with unified communications. The company saved infrastructure cost by 30 percent through the use of ESN. Sapient’s Vox is another success stories, the company launched it in 2010 as internal social network but in the due course of time they have utilized it to capture knowledge and utilized it in the company’s growth.
Success behind the implementation of ESN by these companies is their ability to define their problem and designing the solutions around their problem.
Source: www.informationweek.com
