The need to enhance communication and collaboration in the workplace to increase employee engagement, accelerate decision-making, and boost overall productivity is driving the global enterprise social networking market.
Organizations are integrating purposeful social collaboration functionality into workflows to dynamically connect people and information at the appropriate time, instead of relying solely on legacy collaboration tools utilized in traditional static use cases.
Frost & Sullivan’s new research, Analysis of the Global Enterprise Social Networking Market, finds the total number of full-suite enterprise social platform subscribers is expected to go up from 208 million in 2013 to 535 million in 2018. Currently, there are about 2 billion workers worldwide who could benefit from enterprise social technologies across numerous industries, organizations, locations and job roles.
For example, in the Philippines, China Banking Corporation (China Bank) is adopting IBM social business technology to connect, engage, and empower its over 6,000 employees.
The bank embarked on a social business transformation project with IBM, replacing its e-mail and intranet system with the more robust IBM Connections social networking platform that empowers the China Bank workforce with the ability to build social communities both inside and outside the Bank, and the IBM Sametime instant messaging for real-time communication and more effective collaboration.
Even government has embraced social technologies. The Department of Trade and Industry will fully implement Microsoft’s Office 365, to provide employees access to the latest versions of Microsoft Office, as well as collaborative technologies like instant messaging and video conferencing, portals and even social media for the workplace using Yammer.
“Enterprise social networking continues to have mass appeal as it combines the user-friendliness and relationship-oriented nature of consumer social media with more powerful features and enterprise-grade control,” said Frost & Sullivan Information and Communication Technologies Program Manager and Industry Principal Robert Arnold. “Moreover, its ability to significantly improve business agility, responsiveness, innovation, and customer service owing to increased employee access to information and expertise bolsters the market.”
The benefits of enhancing business through social channels are resonating with decision-makers, but every organization needs to set realistic expectations and measure performance (sometimes creatively) to make the value proposition meaningful for their specific situation. A shift in employee behavior and company culture is required to foster contribution and engagement by the critical mass of users needed to make enterprise social networking successful.
In addition, the future of enterprise collaboration requires a smarter combination of different tools that can be customized to best fit each organization’s and workgroup’s unique needs. Manufacturers started delivering on these requirements, with some leading platforms offering strong analytics and reporting functionality that not only demonstrate the true value of enterprise social capabilities, but also give companies globally relevant insights to adjust their business strategies as warranted by market conditions and other external and internal factors.
Key challenges
Nevertheless, governance, risk, compliance, and security concerns – particularly in regulated industries and lines of business – will remain a key challenge until enterprise social networking solutions mature further, and customers become more educated on its value. The financial services sector is already among the leading adopters of these solutions owing to better education, careful planning, and well-defined implementation and usage strategies.
“Likewise, organizations of all sizes across different industries could benefit from enterprise social networking solutions,” stated Arnold. “It will be important, however, for end users globally to determine the best deployment model (hosted or premises-based), features, and use what will deliver the most value for them.”
However, while all businesses could benefit from social tools, large companies and SMBs use them in dramatically different ways, leading to very different selling motions and partner opportunities, according to a research by Microsoft Corp.
The report reveals that SMBs are more likely to utilize multiple external social tools for professional purposes. Large companies, on the other hand, are more likely to deploy fewer, more prevalent collaboration tools.
Although the top use for social tools in both large companies and SMBs is communicating with colleagues (selected by seven in 10 of all end users surveyed), those at smaller companies use social tools for a broader range of tasks, including communicating with customers, clients or vendors and researching customers, clients and competitors. In contrast, end users are large companies are more likely to use social tools for finding an expert of information within their company.
