Social technologies play an important role in business, improving communication between employees and opening new channels for customer dialogue. The key to extracting business value from those social technologies is making sure that they go beyond just talk.
Improved communication is crucial across the enterprise. However, unless that communication results in rapid business decisions and business actions, the returns from enterprise social tools can't reach their full potential.
Most social business platforms are disconnected from the processes, systems and data that drive the organization. This means employees engaged in social collaboration must then go to a different application ñ or set of applications ñ to turn that collaboration into business action. This constant change of application context is not only a productivity inhibitor. It also creates social silos that cannot be audited as part of a business process or decision trail.
When leveraged properly, social business process management tools can improve productivity and efficiency, creating a more agile organization. These tools allow both collaboration and business action in the same social interface. Knowledge workers and decision makers get the collaborations and data they need, plus the ability to execute process actions without any application context changes.
The result is better and faster action to improve performance and deliver a better customer experience.
