GFTPZ2P5UJR5

Everything is hectic. One employee is complaining that they can’t find a certain file. Another employee’s sporadically emailing people to figure out if they should add tax for a particular PO. Sales reps are calling to figure out what stage the contract is in.

There’s no avoiding the scramble at quarter end. But a couple years ago, the TIBCO finance department found a way to make things a little better. By using an enterprise social network, the finance team streamlines accounting close information and communication, and even enhances collaboration with their auditors.

Saving Time & Not Making Mistakes

To increase efficiency and reduce errors, employees share best practices on a private subject within the network. One employee advises that his teammates add tax for orders from Spain; another employee explains that a certain vendor is always being charged tax when they shouldn’t be and offers tips on how to recalculate. The subject works as a live Q&A, for employees to search and reference, helping them find in-depth answers and eliminate errors.

Cutting Out the Email Clutter

“Before tibbr, I was always cleaning out my inbox all of the time,” said one employee from the finance department. With almost 90 people on one email distribution list, employees would receive hundreds of emails, many of which had the same title.  (continued…)

This article was originally published in NETWORKWORLD.

You don’t have to look further than the uprisings across the Arab world to recognize the power of social tools, and this transformative power applies to business as well. But for an enterprise social network (ESN) to be genuinely useful, it needs to go beyond the “Facebook for enterprise” model.

In evaluating the usefulness of any social platform, here are four essentials to look for:

1. Getting work done faster. Enterprise social networks are more than giant digital water coolers, and this is where ESNs need to rise above the typical consumer social experience. Social in the enterprise is not just about “following” Sarah in finance, but following your expenses and getting status updates on them. It’s not just about knowing which songs your friends are listening to on Spotify, but “listening” for changes to your purchase order. Not just about sharing and commenting on posts, but acting on posts (e.g., from your business apps). Not merely checking into a location, but actually getting relevant business information about your location and surroundings.

2. Information where and when you need it. As our mobile devices blend into our work lives, for most organizations “bring your own device” is now a given, and any useful ESN needs to account for this. (continued…)

Even if management has heard of the benefits of enterprise social networking, they might not be sold on the idea. It’s important to get their buy-in from the get-go as they play a fundamental role in driving the transformational process.

In order to “sell” the idea to management, here are five areas to focus on…

Hone in on What Your Boss Wants

Put yourself in your manager’s place and figure out exactly what goals need to be met. Is it obtaining profits? Onboarding sales reps faster? Or, meeting investor and shareholders demands? Think about their current goals, then decide on which business objectives will help them meet their goals. (For further insight, look at these 6 Questions to Ask Before You Buy-In to Enterprise Social.)

Make sure to include high-level, company-wide objectives, so other teams and departments can benefit as well. The power of the network lies in collective knowledge sharing, idea sharing, expertise discovery and more, so think big picture. Ultimately the objective should catalyze a community. Once you have your top objectives, hone in on the expected return, why it’s worth investing. This leads us to our next question…

What’s the ROI?

At the end of the day, executives want real numbers. (continued…)

As a brand new sales rep for TIBCO, I was responsible for selling more than a dozen products. This was daunting, to say the least. I had to quickly learn what these products do, who knows what about the products, corresponding customer stories, and everything about competitors.

Out of my initial list of target accounts to sign on as new customers, one of them was a hi-tech manufacturer who happened to be in the market for a B2B partner management solution. This prospect had a short selection timeline of 30 days, so I needed to figure out exactly what our technology offered and how it could be positioned to them.

Like most new sales reps, we’re given a few training sessions and then we’re on our own to fill in the rest. Normally, I would spend that time interviewing other account executives on how to ramp up quickly, or sort through some sort of knowledge management system or portal (where documents usually go to die). Instead, I found myself relying on tibbr, TIBCO’s enterprise social network, to immediately find the answers I needed.

When the prospect asked for a customer referral, I found an invaluable reference from another sales rep on tibbr. (continued…)

With the seismic shift to cloud services taking place across markets and amongst businesses of all sizes today, we are seeing a fundamental change in how customers buy new apps and services. A straightforward, get started motion is now an expectation – services need to be easily switched “On” out of the box. Increasingly, businesses are interested in that same easy button for service delivery across all the services they purchase and use.

Enter the cloud services aggregator, a single trusted partner that provides a single login, standardized provisioning, one bill, and one support contact across a business’s apps and services, from cloud applications to hosted software packages. Playing the dual role of retailer and delivery engine for services, a cloud services aggregator often provides compelling packages enabled by combining a broad catalogue with deep customer knowledge.

Today tibbr announced a platform partnership with KPN, a pioneering cloud service aggregator and leading telecommunications provider, with years of experience providing IT services to business customers. The tibbr offering through KPN, which has been optimized for the KPN Grip platform, delivers a ready-to-go and straightforward user experience with clear customer ROI. With this expansion of its platform ecosystem, tibbr brings the enterprise social network to new geographic markets and lowers the barrier for businesses to take advantage of tibbr’s ability to connect people, files, and business applications in a contextual and personal way. (continued…)

Quick! We need someone to help us build a mobile app. Start looking for developers on LinkedIn.

Hold up.

How much will it cost to headhunt? How much time will it take? Anyone less than a “10” will drag down the business.

Plus, have we thought about the additional costs of hiring full time? Health benefits alone cost 1.5 times the salary. And what if the product fails, then what?

So many questions…

Sometimes it’s just better to crowdsource talent from within.

Take for example, the other day I was writing copy for a landing page, for an event coming up in Munich. I don’t speak German, so part of the challenge was finding someone to translate the document. Rather than hire a translator or outsource a firm, I posted a question to our enterprise social network asking if anyone could translate the document. Sure enough someone could.

There are countless examples where employees crowdsource talent from their internal social network: one employee finds the right person to troubleshoot a technical problem; another employee finds someone who has experience optimizing websites for Google search results (saving the company thousands of dollars otherwise spent on an SEO firm). I could keep going. (continued…)

The annual review is coming up—meaning one year’s worth of work will come down to one review. It’s no wonder managers and employees alike dread the whole process.

Wouldn’t it be better if performance reviews were more ongoing?

In fact, businesses that provide performance reviews on a regular basis see better performance. Research from Bersin by Deloitte shows, companies that revisit goals for employees quarterly, outperform those that set goals annually by more than 30%.

Improvement not only requires monitoring results and adjusting on a continual basis, but also a more social approach. Employees need to receive constructive feedback from their colleagues on ways to improve, and not just a number ranking on a performance review chart. This means the review process should not only be more transparent, but more meaningful to the employee.

Now that Teamly has released a new social performance management app designed for tibbr,  employees can formally review and reward performance right from their enterprise social network. The Teamly app supports performance reviews, employee recognition, goal setting and even task management. It’s designed around people and processes. For example, employees can award a badge of recognition on a colleagues profile to make them feel valued as well as notify their manager for their hard work. (continued…)

We’ve evolved from paintings on cave walls to rhetoric on social media sites, and now businesses are taking advantage of enterprise social media in the workplace as well.

Technology writer Clay Shirky talks about how our generation is living through “the largest increase in expressive capability in human history.” Social media combines all previous mediums of communication—from Paleolithic cave paintings to movies and print. But before, these previous mediums only allowed for one person to talk to a group or one-on-one conversations; now social media provides support for group conversations. Audiences can talk back, and interact with each other. They present ideas and information, dialogue and socratically question.

We’ve already seen how public social media unites audiences, heightens political campaigns and accelerates human rights activism. Now we’re starting to see businesses take advantage of this medium internally as well.

Take Pharmex, an international outsourcing partner for the sale of healthcare products. With 3,800 employees in 19 countries, Pharmexx needed a way to connect employees across boundaries to improve knowledge sharing and better assist their clients. Pharmexx started using tibbr, enterprise social networking integrated with SharePoint, to allow conversations in context of key business updates and enhance interdepartmental effectiveness and knowledge sharing.   (continued…)

An enterprise social network looks, feels, and functions very similar to public social media sites like Facebook, with one important exception – its primary purpose is to use social interaction to support valuable business outcomes and get work done.

How Does Enterprise Social Networking Support Business Objectives? 
Here are some of the benefits internal social networking provides your business:

• Increases knowledge sharing and gives employees faster access to internal experts
• Organizes information, making knowledge management simpler and less costly
• Integrates with key business applications through activity streams, giving employees the ability to act on information from one interface
• Allows employees to stay connected from anywhere via their mobile device
• Enhances the customer feedback loop, increasing customer support and satisfaction
• Enhances sales, marketing and interdepartmental effectiveness
• Improves collaboration across geographies, reducing travel costs by allowing instantaneous communication
• Improves employee on-boarding and staff engagement
• Boosts morale through employee recognition on a company-wide network

Similar to public social media sites, with an enterprise social network you can expect many of the same features: your own feed with real-time updates, the ability to follow people and groups, instant messaging capabilities, customizable profile, the ability to post status updates and messages, key-word search and more. However, tibbr takes the idea of an enterprise social network much farther than the basic features you experience with public social media sites. (continued…)

In the business world, time really is money. Here are the top 5 time sinks at work and how enterprise social networking helps you be more productive.

Switching between Tasks

The average worker switches tasks every 3 minutes, forcing a ridiculous amount of time and cognitive resources into refocusing. Human beings are easily fascinated, often leading to our short attention span. But, how can we embrace this overpowering tendency to multi-task? Enterprise social networking provides a single pane of glass that incorporates multiple applications so that switching through a myriad of tasks, whether on a desktop computer or smartphone, is much more manageable.

Finding Expertise and Key Information

Tracking down the right person and information through a bunch of phone calls and emails is a serious waste of time. McKinsey Global Institute estimates we spend about 2 hours of our workday searching for experts and information, which we can find 35% faster through an enterprise social network. With a social platform, messages become searchable content, and finding answers is as simple as posting on a wall.

Too many Meetings

How often do you find yourself spending hours in meetings when that time could be better used for getting real work done? (continued…)