Socialtext White Paper Sample

We’ve been collaborating for a long time, but we’ve been doing it the hard way. Using today’s business tools – email with attached documents – collaboration has been slow, difficult and ineffective. Topics get fragmented across many places – individual emails, different versions of presentations, excel files and word documents – stored in different desktop applications, shared drives and content management systems. And with all the communication overhead, most people in an organization know very little about what is going on. In the words of one Socialtext customer, “We don’t know what we know.” Corporate employees spend up to 1 day a week looking for information, according to research firm IDC. The cost of this unproductive time can be as much as 25% of your staff costs. And according to an IBM study of 400 human resources executives, only 13% of people can find someone with a particular area of expertise in their own company. This means the bulk of work doesn’t leverage the specialized knowledge that exists right there in the company, because there is no good way to find it.

Social software solutions, based on microblogging, social networking, wikis and other Web 2.0 technologies, are focused on solving these problems. But social software only addresses these problems to the extent it connects the right people and information fluidly and easily. With the right social software, people connect and share, group productivity and organizational effectiveness are dramatically increased, and decision cycle times greatly reduced. These results may be critical to survival in difficult economic times, and deploying the right social software is the easiest, most cost effective way to achieve them. This paper is designed to inform your search for a social software solution that achieves these business results.