Social Business - The CIO's Guide to Oracle Products and Solutions - page 127

SOCIAL NETWORKING TOOLS AT WORK
Most professionals, when they think of social networking at all, think in
terms of Facebook and Twitter. CIOs see great potential in these sorts of
tools. IBM conducted a worldwide study of 2,500 CIOs in late 2010. The
collective take on collaboration tools is that they need to be institutional-
ized to meet the demands of the business. Surprisingly, as we will shortly
show, and with some effort, all of these can be “institutionalized” in some
way to enhance the productivity of the software engineering discipline.
Given the popularity of these sorts of tools among consumers, it is no
wonder that a variety of these sorts of tools have cropped up that are
geared to specific business disciplines.
Tools That Provide Networking Capabilities
Salesforce.com, the enterprise CRM giant, has begun to involve itself in
providing social networking capabilities. Its new Chatter service is avail-
able on Salesforce's real-time collaboration cloud. Users establish profiles
and generate status updates. These might be questions, bits of information
and/or knowledge, or relevant hyperlinks. All of this is then aggregated and
broadcast to coworkers in their personal network. Essentially, a running
feed of comments and updates flow to those within that particular network.
Employees can also follow colleagues from around the company, not just
in their own personal network, enabling cross-organizational knowledge
sharing. Toward that end, Chatter also provides a profile database that
users can tap into to find needed skills for a particular project. Chatter is
accessible via desktop or mobile.
Like Salesforce.com, more than a handful of well-known software com-
panies have developed collaboration tools, all for a fee. Oracle's Beehive
provides a spate of tools such as instant messaging, e-mail, calendaring,
and team workspaces, as shown in Figure 4.5.
There are also a wide variety of free tools available that can be adapted
for our purposes, although keep in mind that much of what I am going to
talk about can be done via the Beehive or other Oracle social platforms.
LinkedIn has been widely used to provide networking capabilities for
businesspeople. A relevant feature is LinkedIn groups. A group can be cre-
ated for any purpose, with permission granted to join. Thus, project teams
can make use of the already developed facilities LinkedIn provides. For