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Nov 20 2009   4:21PM GMT

Salesforce.com’s Chatter: A collaboration tool worth talking about



Posted by: Kristen Caretta
CIO, Midmarket CIO, collaboration tools

 Salesforce.com has announced that it has developed a collaboration platform that brings social networking into the enterprise — Salesforce Chatter. And for the more than 60,000 Salesforce.com customers, Chatter should be something to talk about.

Chatter will compete against Lotus Notes and SharePoint but will be more like the social networking tools many people are already using in their personal lives. With functionality similar to Facebook, Salesforce Chatter allows employees to set up their own profiles including contact information, photo, work history and area of expertise. Users can also pull in any existing information from Facebook profiles.

Employees will then be able to collaborate internally through real-time status and content updates, similar to the way friends do on Facebook. Business applications also have a place in Chatter to keep everyone up to date on inventory, for example. Well, only those you want to stay in the loop. Chatter also allows you to filter certain information to the appropriate employees.

Even Twitter can be integrated with Chatter, allowing users to set up a search and automatically stream the results into Chatter.

Why do I think this could actually catch on in the enterprise? News of Google Wave (still in beta) hit the Web hard — with blogs, tweets and news outlets covering it from all angles. But many CIOs and IT directors still expressed a lot of hesitance when it came to the idea of Google Wave in the enterprise, citing concerns such as security, manageability and accountability.

Chatter, on the other hand, will be coming from an already enterprise-trusted source — a good steppingstone for organizations looking to bring more social networking into their corporate lives, as research firm Gartner recently suggested. There may be less resistance about bringing a cloud-based collaboration platform into the workplace if it’s atop a tried and true foundation.  Salesforce.com already stores critical business information in its cloud applications and has delivered top-notch security and a trusted sharing model. This could up the level of enterprise adoption right out of the starting gates — that and the fact that when Salesforce Chatter is available next year, it will be included in all paid editions of Salesforce CRM and Force.com.

And if you’re worried about how this will stack up in the mobile world, Chatter versions are available for BlackBerry, Windows Mobile and the iPhone.

Could this be the beginning of more collaboration and social networking within the enterprise?

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Apr 3 2009   2:56PM GMT

Do collaboration tools really increase employee productivity?



Posted by: Karen Guglielmo
employee productivity, collaboration tools, IT/business alignment

Did you know that the cost of not finding information is $3,300 per employee per year, according to IDC research? That’s crazy! IDC’s research credits ineffective searches; poor, inconsistent access tools; re-created content; reformats; and revisions as factors in causing employees to not find the information they need. So if you’re a midsized company with 500 employees, you’re talking $1,650,000 in productivity losses each year. In this economy, who can afford to take such a hit?

Many midmarket IT organizations are looking at collaboration tools like Microsoft’s SharePoint and social technology platforms to help centralize documents, manage people, tasks and time, and ultimately improve employee productivity. But can collaboration tools actually eliminate or lessen the $3,300 per-employee productivity loss companies are experiencing?

Increased productivity is one of the benefits of collaboration tools, because users travel less and spend less time searching for relevant information and expertise, said Rob Koplowitz, principal analyst at Forrester Research. But these benefits are rarely measured in terms of a formal ROI. Business owners really want to know “if I work with IT, will things work better?” he said.

But some midmarket companies are actually seeing measurable ROI from their investment in collaboration tools. One company is Los Angeles-based Equipois Inc., which manufactures a “zero gravity” mechanical arm technology for use in industrial and biomedical applications. Equipois uses Central Desktop for collaboration among three offices across the country for nearly all operational aspects of the business, from R&D to purchasing to customer project management.

“The cost of hardware, software and staffing to replicate this collaboration would be roughly 40 to 60 times our current annual expenditures, giving us an astronomical ROI,” said Eric Golden, Equipios’s CEO. Using these collaboration tools, “we’ve seen $40,000 to $70,000 in one-time cost savings and $65,000 savings in recurring costs.”

How does he know? Central Desktop’s SaaS social technology platform comes with an ROI calculator that computes weekly and annual savings in terms of system administrator hours reduced, estimated dollars spent on servers and number of hours employees saved not needing to rework documents and manage revisions. Based on feedback from customers, “many companies are seeing ROI savings of one to two hours per day, per employee, using our product,” said Isaac Garcia, CEO and co-founder of Central Desktop.

Golden didn’t say what he’s spending on Central Desktop, but the company’s pricing chart indicates you can have up to 100 users on it for, at most, about $25 a month each. That’s about $300 a year — less than 10% of that $3,300 number we cited earlier.

Central Desktop is just one of many collaboration tools out there, and none are a panacea for every productivity challenge. But as midmarket companies continue looking for ways to cut costs and remain productive in this tough economy, chipping away at that $1,650,000 is one way to boost IT’s contribution in today’s business environment.

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