There is not a day that goes by that I am not asked “Why is social computing important to the business?”
Then it’s time to break out the tap shoes and start the dance about breaking down silos, and improving productivity, morale, etc. What I wish I had was great analytics that would let me extrapolate data, mashup with the corporate directory and be able to make a core set of dashboards. These dashboard need to be exposed to my users so that they can see overall why these platforms are important, and help understand their own personal success with them. They also need to be available to my management to reassure them that the money and effort that people are spending being “social” are indeed providing value. Yet I find most vendors are wrapped around new features that the competition has or a trend that is emerging from social platforms like Facebook and twitter, and analytics often get left behind like a forgotten step-child.
Let’s look at a few examples:
How many active contributors are from Country X?
How has use of platform y impacted our e-mail usage?
How is this platform breaking down silos?
How many people use this platform regularly?
Enter in the new licensing 2.0 model: the “subscription” model. Many of the Enterprise 2.0 vendors are looking to execute what seems to have been Bill Gates’s Shargri La; to guarantee a revenue stream by making their customers rent their software instead of actually owning it. While I have many issues with this model (and enough for a separate blog post), they’re mostly quelled providing that I can easily quantify the value on a continuous basis, I still don’t have tools to do that. Even worse, These 2.0 vendors want me to pay extra for these features that help their value proposition.
Is it all bad? No, analytics are getting better, but not at the rate that I would hope. Help us all by telling our vendors just how valuable it is to have these complete and robust capabilities as a core feature in their tools to show our management why these Enterprise 2.0 tools deserve a place in our organization.
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