Social network for office employees. Corporate social tools and their role in the company

This is wrong, since they are still quite different tools with different properties and different tasks.

• Comments to news on the portal are NOT a social network!
• The pages with user profiles on the portal are NOT a social network!
• Even blogs and wikis are NOT a social network yet!

This does not involve people! Attendance fluctuates between low and very low, and the number of posts and comments can be counted on one hand. Sound familiar?

Blogs

Blogs are a good tool for expressing your thoughts in detail. But their biggest drawback is that not all users are ready to write long, detailed notes.

It is estimated that out of 100 readers, only 1 will write blog posts. And only 10 will comment. Thus, new posts will appear a couple of times a week. It's too rare for your employees to get into the habit of checking in regularly to read new blogs.

And if people do not have the habit of reading, then even the 1% of users who would like to do so will not write to such a blog. After all, what is the point of writing something that almost no one will read? This is why corporate blogs rarely gain real popularity.

Wiki

A wiki is a good useful tool for collaboration or for accumulating and organizing knowledge.

But in and of itself, it is not engaging. Few people will go to the wiki every day and re-read the articles - if something new has appeared. Subscribing to changes also does not give the desired result, since most of the changes are minor and do not concern you personally (based on personal experience).

As a result, the wiki often becomes the lot of only a few enthusiasts who just really believe in its usefulness.

Forums

Forums can provide a fairly good degree of user engagement. But still less than social networks can give. We can say that forums are the progenitor of today's social networks.

In my opinion, the main problem of forums is their complex structure with sections, subsections and topics. To get to the content you need, you have to sweat a little each time :)

Social networks, in this sense, bring a good follow-up (or "friend") tool. This allows you to subscribe to the right people and the right topics once and then read only ONE news page, which contains only what you are really interested in.

Therefore, the forums are, although a good tool, but increasingly receding into the past.

Email

Although e-mail has positive aspects of its use, you should not close your eyes to many of the problems that arise when working with it, in particular, communication problems:

• Information is hidden in mailboxes and access to it is impossible for people not participating in the conversation;
• For each recipient of the letter, the information is duplicated. Like a virus;
• Redundant email attachments eat up disk space;
• It becomes difficult to communicate with each new person involved in the discussion.

But there is one more thing that has made email the biggest productivity drain for employees - forcing email communication on the recipient of the email. Yes, this applies specifically to the recipient and not to the sender. Developing a structure for storing letters and sorting out the chaos in folders with incoming messages - this is the result of the absence of its own communication structure in mail. As a result, filtering letters becomes a difficult task - it is necessary to determine the relevant information, find letters related to each other and scatter all this in folders. These actions are performed by each person participating in the discussion, for each separate thread of letters. And if you add to this highly intellectual work "professional spam" - when the recipient has no opportunity to refuse some of the discussions to which he was added by the sender - the situation becomes unmanageable for many people and a lot of time is wasted.

An illustration of the difference between a “culture of professional spam” and a “culture of choice”.

In a “culture of choice,” each and every one has the ability to determine what conversations they want to actively participate in. Most likely, these will be discussions that are of value to the employee and topics of interest to him. This means that conversation topics are open by default and hosted on open platforms. In this case, the sender accepts the fact that the recipient is not obliged to spend his time getting acquainted with all publications, but reads only those that are most interesting and valuable to him.

Even people who use email out of habit can be lured into a new kind of communication. They can still write messages by email, automatically leaving messages on the corporate social network, rather than the mailing list in the email. Thus, they will accurately deliver information to those who will be interested in it. Even if other team members choose to subscribe to the group / topic via email, the information will remain available online to anyone who will ever need it. Once the recipients have read the information, they can safely delete the email and still be confident that they will find the contents of the email in the group / subject. In other words, there is no need to spend time organizing emails in your mail client folders to simplify future searches. They simply go to a group on a corporate social network to find the topic they want, find it using a general search or in a list of topics. If they want to leave a comment on the discussion, why not do it in a group where everyone can see who commented on what, instead of creating multiple bundles of emails by clicking the reply all button.

How to benefit from corporate social media

Unlike blogs and wikis, it is very easy to write on social media because it does not require the creation of large in-depth articles. And writing a post for a couple of sentences is easy, almost anyone can. Our statistics show that active writers on the corporate social network account for 30%. That is, engagement is an order of magnitude greater than that of blogs (1% of authors and 10% of commentators).

Corporate social networking is better at engaging people than any other Enterprise 2.0 tool. It really allows your employees to go there every day. Simply because there will always be something new and interesting.

And if your employees start going to your social network every day, then it will immediately become a way to increase traffic to all your other internal resources - corporate portal, blogs, wikis, project management systems, distance learning systems, and others. To do this, it will be enough to simply publish links to new events in these resources on the social network, and this can be done automatically.

In short, the corporate social network is designed to increase traffic and the demand for all communication and collaboration tools existing in your company. And therefore it should not be confused with anything else!

A recent study by the McKinsey Global Institute, The Social Economy: Unlocking Value and Productivity Through Social Technologies, claims that using social technology, companies can increase productivity by as much as 25%.

Based on their research, researchers at the McKinsey Global Institute have identified four main areas where collaboration platforms are most effective in increasing office productivity:

1. Email. About 28% of the time (11.2 hours per week) is spent on average answering and reading emails. When using corporate social networks, the time spent is reduced by as much as 30% (about 4 hours per week), due to the ability to search through all created messages.
2. Search and collection of information. 19% (7.6 hours per week) on average, spend on finding inside information that certain employees in the company have. Again, because of the ability to search through absolutely all content created, this figure can be reduced by almost 35% (to ~ 4.9 hours per week), saving an average of 2.7 hours per employee.
3. Communication and collaboration. Using the phone, e-mail, personal meetings between employees takes about 5.6 hours of the work week (14%). Using an internal social network, an employee can directly contact the right person, bypassing the mailbox, and without cluttering it, which will help your company save up to 35% of working time (2 hours) per employee.
4. Execution of specific tasks. Company employees spend the most time on tasks, approximately 39% or 15.6 hours per week. Internal social media helps increase productivity by about 15% (2.3 hours per week). On the one hand, corporate tools allow you to centralize all work processes in one place, and on the other hand, all your employees can use these functions to directly perform tasks.

Myths about social corporate tools

Many people hesitate to use social collaboration tools due to misconceptions or lack of a clear route to success. In addition, vague descriptions of the benefits of connecting and involving employees do not convey the true meaning of knowledge sharing and social collaboration in solving critical business problems. And don't forget about security issues.

Below are five common myths that keep companies from getting cutting-edge social collaboration tools and comments on them.

Myth 1 - Social collaboration platforms are not reliable or secure.

Since most social collaboration tools are located within the organization's IT infrastructure, you can be confident that all of your data is in a secure environment - ideal for professionals and teams working on sensitive projects or assignments.

Myth 2 - Corporate social tools are more for bringing employees together, communication and fun, they cannot be used to complete tasks.

Companies are turning to corporate social platforms to achieve critical business goals, including fast interaction, knowledge sharing, and smarter communications to avoid the unnecessary headaches and limitations of email discussed above. Instead of sifting through a chain of multiple emails just to find the most important and relevant information and then waiting for a response, employees get instant access to experts, departments and information to complete critical tasks!

Myth 3 - Corporate social tools help employees use social media to communicate with their key audience.

Traditional social networking sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter primarily bring people together on a personal, equal level outside of corporate firewalls. In contrast, corporate social tools are used to engage users within the organization to solve business problems, unleash expert knowledge to create innovation, make decisions and improve results. These collaboration tools are secure, streamlined, work in real time, and synchronize team interactions and communications, resulting in increased productivity and profitability.

Myth 4 - Corporate social tools do not solve real business problems / do not show true ROI.

There is a great need for an informal work tool that circumvents the typical software barriers found in most organizations. Modern technologies (CRM, ERM, business process automation and others) do their job by storing information and providing assistance to standard business processes, but they do not support the dynamic informal communications required for innovative thinking and joint decision-making. Corporate social collaboration tools have shown positive gains in business efficiency, productivity and transparency, helping teams solve real-world problems and get things done. The main thing to do is to link these metrics to the organization's business goals. Once aligned with business goals, the true benefits of corporate social collaboration tools can be measured for real ROI.

Myth 5 - Social corporate collaboration tool cannot be adapted to suit my needs. I have no choice but to invest in a completely reliable platform.

The company can always choose which social interaction tools will provide the opportunities and benefits that are most important to the organization. The Formicary Collaboration Group believes that these tools can be divided into three categories: employee engagement, employee awareness, and collective intelligence. Companies can start with the categories that meet the most pressing business needs and move on from there. For example, it makes sense to choose tools that maximize your organisation's talent base for talent pooling, or improve direct interactions between teams to make decisions on critical issues. Regardless of the category or needs of the company, implementation should not happen overnight, but become a process.

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Various sources estimate that, on average, each employee spends about 12 hours per month on personal communication on social networks. You can prohibit access to them from workplaces, limit the time of visiting for some groups, or you can take the best that social networks have in their toolkit and satisfy the need of workers for virtual communication.

Someone will say that we have a corporate portal and why do we need something else. Let's see what is a corporate portal? This is the company's internal website that combines a large number of information services and provides access to information related to the company's production processes. In addition to the classic functions of providing reference data about employees and the structure of the company, the portal serves to integrate with special information systems and services, financial and accounting systems, project management, file resources, forums, etc. What will the integration of social network functions with a corporate portal give ?

Terms and Definitions

For further understanding, let's add a few abbreviations and definitions:

KCC is a corporate social network, an analogue of a social network familiar to many with its functionality, but created to meet business needs. This is a professional social network that solves the problems of organizing and supporting the company's activities.

Working page in KCC - an analogue of a personal page in a social network in terms of functionality, its main purpose is to provide an employee with a convenient and unified tool for performing his job duties. This is a kind of a single workstation by job function. In most cases, the work page is personal, but if necessary, it can be anonymized for some positions, for example, the work page "engineer on duty". It has a replacement function, when during the absence of an employee, the entire work page or some of its functions are transferred to other specialists or to other work pages.

Functionality of the working page - a set of rules for displaying news subscriptions, participation in groups and other functions corresponding to the job description. So, the functionality of the working page of the technologist of the relay protection and automation service includes links to all software systems used by the employee, notifications from these complexes, notifications from schedulers indicating the need to perform routine actions, a subscription about incoming requests, oscillograms, requests from other structural units, changes in regulations, etc.

Work page owner - an employee performing job duties corresponding to the functionality of this work page.

Profitable tandem

So, back to the benefits of integrating KCC and portal. Company employees will be able to have their own profile, which is functionally different from the profile on the social network and contains, in addition to personal information (photos, hobbies), additional professional information - position, location, phone number, competencies and basic job responsibilities. This will help to establish informal communication between colleagues and will contribute to strengthening the corporate spirit, will reduce the time spent on solving business issues, coordinating actions and finding the necessary competencies.

Each employee, in accordance with his job responsibilities, has a set of customized views, notifications and filters and timely receives the necessary production information, orders and regulations, notifications about the onset of planned events, as well as additional information, such as colleagues' birthdays. Further, by integrating the functions of the social network with the electronic document management and management system, the process of issuing orders and approving documents is simplified. By including the scheduling function in these systems, there is no need to worry that some order will be forgotten.

The corporate social network completely takes over the function of internal communication and replaces email, expanding its functions. The creation of conferences, chat, comments and notes in conjunction with the functions of office work, organizing orders and scheduling activities make information about business processes more accessible, visual and transparent, and the processes themselves - controlled. What else can you do with social networking? Supporting almost all business processes of the company, developing the corporate spirit of the team, reducing weaknesses in the organization of activities in the absence or insufficient competence of employees, introducing new automated systems and business processes, training new employees, creating a motivation system, eliminating conflicts that arise within the organization, etc. Let's consider some questions in more detail.

Walking together

How can you benefit from introducing a corporate social network? In short, this is the creation of a company knowledge bank, a think tank with established semantic connections between business processes. It is a convenient organization of the workplace, where everything is at hand, like a conductor, where a single information space has been created for each workplace and where various services are integrated into one information environment to perform official duties. It is also an opportunity to direct the needs of a person in virtual communication to solve the problems of the company. This is also a convenient organization of the execution of orders, control over orders, tasks, the possibility of communication and feedback. This is the customer support service, as close as possible to their problems or needs.

Subscriptions, message boards, notifications and specialized news feed, like similar social media services, will help in the daily activities of any employee. So, the materially responsible person and other employees associated with the supply of equipment will receive a notification on their "wall" that the contract has been concluded and the shipment of the goods has begun. And persons participating in the consideration of applications will receive notifications that another application has arrived for consideration.

Groups in the social network find their application and bring together employees involved in a common cause. For example, in a situation with the automation of production tasks, it is clear that an organization has many business processes at different stages of automation. In these relationships, there is a project customer (technological departments, financial and economic units, etc.), which has its own needs, and there is a project executor (own developer or IT curator when automation is performed by third parties). For each business process, a group is created in the appropriate category and with the appropriate tags, participants are included in this group, their roles and responsibilities are defined.

The situation is similar for external clients of the company, counterparties, government and controlling entities. For example, business correspondence and documents are being negotiated under existing or planned contracts for the provision of services and the supply of goods. For the counterparty, access is organized to a specialized section of the KCC (or an e-mail gateway is configured for a specific counterparty by his email address so that letters from him go to the working pages of interested parties in the KCC). State and other subjects, controlling bodies with which information is exchanged, also get their own access to the resources of the corporate network.

Accurate definition of the target audience for solving the whole variety of the company's tasks will help structure and streamline activities, make sure that only the necessary information is at hand, and the necessary data can be found in simple and accessible actions.

A tool such as a forum or a chat group will be useful during the active phase of the implementation of a project or, for example, when conducting trial operation of a system, when resolving a situation under a technical support agreement, or when providing methodological and consulting assistance to a higher-level branch.

Notifications, news feed, bulletin board on a working page on the network - a digest of business information about the subject area to which the page owner is subscribed. KCC will tell you what needs to be done and how to solve the production problem, even if the employee is absent.

Frames on the network

What opportunities does the system provide in terms of personnel management? The working page of each employee contains information about their competencies and job responsibilities, specified by keywords, tags or an arbitrary description. Organization of access of HR personnel to such information will make it possible to propose possible changes in the personnel structure in the event of a vacancy. Personnel training, internship, training and exchange of experience by job is done much faster. Personnel issues can be resolved remotely using telecommunications.

Classic management talks a lot about horizontal and vertical linkages in the management structure, but KCC will create a process-based relationship structure by adding easy workgroup organization, diagonal linkages between departments and matrix management structures. The network will be able to take over any process, from the working group for the implementation of complex complexes according to PJM standards and ending with the coordination of the working hours of the commission for the inventory of tangible assets.

On the working page, you can place bookmarks on thematic links for the same type of functional duties, in particular, links to the sites of regional and federal energy companies, sites of regulatory documentation for building design, sites of companies under contracts for technical support of computer equipment.

Add comments to messages, create assignments from messages, scheduling based on messages, link and group messages by topic, tagging and keywords to the usual way of e-mail communication. This will allow not only to easily organize the execution of the order, but also to bring together all sources of information on any task or process, find it in the future and restore a complete picture of what is happening.

What does the president of the company, chairman of the board, CEO, deputy director of the company see? Performance metrics, financial statements, breach summaries, order execution and group KPIs - according to how filters are configured and what aggregation is selected.

What's next? Perhaps a sectoral corporate social network that unites energy entities, regulatory authorities and government agencies. Or a state social network, if the state reform in the field of information technology sees the feasibility of creating its own corporate social network.

Implementation problems

Despite the rapid growth in the popularity of corporate social networking solutions, large distributed companies face difficulties in implementing CSS. Why, although the number of installations abroad is growing exponentially, are Russian companies in no hurry to choose a solution for a corporate network? What difficulties do companies face? What are the ways to resolve such conflicts?

From the point of view of technology, the implementation of KCC affects almost all business processes of the company, and, as a result, it is a long-term project with a complex technical task and high cost. Many vendors of SaaS and KSS solutions understand this and offer free versions, some by limiting functionality, others by limiting the number of licenses. It remains for us to select a branch or business area for use as a "pilot" project.

The cost-effectiveness of network implementation is questionable since it seems difficult to calculate ROI. In this case, in order to analyze the effectiveness, it is necessary to include statistical tools and KPIs in the KCC, for example, to assess the cost of operations, the time spent on the process, no rework, etc.

An obstacle to implementation may be the psychological rejection of KCC by top management, which is based on the unwillingness of the top management of companies to personally use this technology and to be, as it were, on a par with all employees. Some developers take this fact into account and specifically offer social tools for top management. For example, to collect round tables with the participation of leaders, where each participant of the social network can prepare his own question, and the leader can give an answer in conference mode to questions that require attention from his point of view. It is very similar to the Internet conferences that the President of Russia arranges in front of journalists.

Company executives tend to believe that advanced solutions are needed only for IT-oriented companies, while ordinary workers believe that this is another information system that no one needs. But practice shows that numerous foreign companies not related to information technology successfully use KCC in their daily work.

Also, a negative attitude towards social networks is formed from a certain stereotype about the uselessness of a social network for business. In practice, it turns out that employees always remain in touch and are involved in the process at any time, and lack of awareness among employees increases the time required for solving problems and leads to lost profits.

There is practically no moderation in ordinary social networks, network participants allow themselves any statements, which is unacceptable in a corporate environment. In fact, if the company has its own corporate culture, then there will be no violations of this culture in the corporate network, and if the employee's correspondence begins to lose its business character, there are always colleagues or a direct manager who will intervene and restore the normal flow of the dialogue.

Information security services will say that the social network contains a huge amount of information available to everyone. But if you define a security policy for KCC, then this issue is no more difficult to implement than a restriction to any other information resources. And the coordination and control over access to information will remain in the hands of information security services.

Most of the available KCCs offer a variety of ways to motivate employees, assess their contribution to the process and generate compensation for work. Given that the network can implement the functions of electronic document management, the question of the legal force of actions in the network arises, such as, for example, fixing the facts of familiarization with business documents and the legality of applying methods for assessing motivation in the corporate network. This problem is technically solved by the use of EDS tools, and organizationally - by the development of local regulations establishing the equivalence of virtual actions in KSS with real actions.

Summing up, we can say that if social networks have effectively solved the problem of communication between people in most countries, then corporate social networks will be able to make corporate communication effective. Often, in order to achieve something, you just need to use opportunities. We know the capabilities of social networks - we need to take them into service and use them to achieve the goals of an organization, company or government.

The corporate portal should be, firstly, useful for work, and secondly, interesting for employees. Meanwhile, having deployed the necessary functionality to provide "first", many companies underestimate the need for the second component. With the introduction of social networking technologies for corporate needs, organizations have fundamentally new opportunities for development.

The development of modern technologies has led to a real revolution in the field of working with corporate information. As you know, Professor Andrew McAfee of Harvard Business School, the author of the concept and concept of Enterprise 2.0, originally defined the concept as "the use of new social software platforms within companies or between companies and their partners and customers." McAfee noted that such tools create numerous, often new connections between employees and the various work groups in the company. These connections foster the dissemination of corporate knowledge and expertise through “cross-pollination” that creates real business benefits for the wave.

Today, the trend of transition from a "community of readers" to a "community of writers" is clearly and clearly manifested not only on the Internet (in blogs, forums and networks), but also in the corporate environment. Therefore, the role of the portal is growing as a point of attraction for socially and business-active employees. Those companies that, on the one hand, create a convenient platform for communication on the portal, and on the other, stimulate employees there to communicate on professional topics, can get very interesting and useful results for themselves.

However, the structuring of information on the portal is often organized in the form of a multi-tiered "cabinet" with "boxes" -sections, where certain documents are stacked and where it is not so easy to find them. It is very difficult to exchange information in this form: it can be found, but it will not be possible to convey it to colleagues, discuss it, change it.

“As soon as we start thinking about how to increase the utilization rate of corporate information, we come to social networking technologies: users not only consume information, but can also comment on it, get feedback,” says Viktor Komar, Director of Integration Solutions Department at IBS. “This is how we can make information work. For those companies that have been using the standard functionality of the corporate portal for a long time and successfully, it makes sense to take a closer look at the new opportunities for organizing employee interaction. "

Instant messaging and constant presence in the virtual information corporate environment is the most important tool for operational communications, - confirms 1C-Bitrix CEO Sergei Ryzhikov. - Intracorporate social network (personal blogs, live feed, microblogging) is a mirror of the company, where people and their relationships are reflected to the smallest detail, the structure of the company with all its efficiency and suboptimality.

Solutions for the organization of corporate social networks are becoming more and more in demand for purely practical reasons of management. Companies are becoming increasingly aware that the most significant competencies of employees lie in the field of "tacit knowledge". Implicit knowledge is in the heads of employees, as opposed to explicit - documented on paper, in the form of files or data in various information systems. Analysts estimate that the ratio of tacit to explicit knowledge in an organization is typically about 80 to 20.

“An organization that strives for successful development needs to encourage employees to put on the corporate portal or any other resource of the company at least some part of the knowledge that is only in their heads,” says Irina Maksimets, Head of the Software Department of SITRONICS Information Technologies in Russia. - Corporate social networks with the support of internal informal technologies for working with information is one of the most effective tools to achieve this goal.

“Thanks to the activeness of the employees,” Viktor Komar continues the topic, “the portal creates the so-called UGC (user-generated content), which is the main element for both the corporate social network and the knowledge management system. It is clear that the sites inside the portal will be mainly grouped according to professionalism - in the same way as communities of interest are created on the Internet: lawyers will communicate with lawyers, and technologists - with technologists. For example, one of the largest holdings is implementing a global program for the transformation of accounting. And the accountants of several dozen enterprises of the holding, scattered throughout the country, really need a platform to discuss their problems, exchange experience, and generate solutions. Where can they do it? Naturally, on the portal - and best of all on a site specially designated for these purposes inside it. "

In particular, portal technologies make it possible to create an educational social network based on a corporate portal, where specialists discuss important topics, give advice and train newcomers, create documents and suggest ideas. In fact, employees create and form a community of like-minded people and professionals. The solution to this problem allows them to create value for the company, "charge" newcomers and bring less active employees to participate in corporate team events. In addition, according to Irina Maksimets, the portal can become an indispensable tool for implementing the strategy of the entire corporation or its transition to a new branding program.

The correct use of the proposed technologies of the corporate portal helps companies to maintain their uniqueness and not lose their value in the market.

The capabilities of corporate social networks are complemented by the fact that modern platforms have tools for transparent integration of the desktop and user applications with the portal. For example, a person directly from Word can publish a version of a document, and it becomes available to other users. And progress in search technologies (tagging, keywords, typing, voice search), the possibility of end-to-end search across various sources, including taking into account the level of access that the portal provides to users, make it possible to make any content easily accessible.

Well forgotten old

Tools for creating internal social networks and collaboration are included in almost all modern developed technologies, software lines of large ECM vendors, such as, for example, IBM, Documentum or Microsoft. In addition, there are a large number of specialized solutions on the market, tailored specifically for the corporate segment.

Konstantin Zhukov notes: “The Enterprise 2.0 concept and its Wikis, Blogs and mash-up applications continue to gain popularity. I would like to note that the new version of SAP NetWeaver Portal 7.3 widely supports all these modern trends. "

The organization and operation of internal corporate social networks is similar to open ones. In them, each user also fills out his profile, indicates competencies, interests, goals, blogs, and establishes connections with colleagues. At the same time, groups of people who are interested in certain things can form freely, on the basis of self-organization. An important factor in this is the visualization of this entire economy and the quick finding of the necessary information within the corporate network. Ideally, the larger the company, the more in demand these technologies are.

However, it is necessary to understand that the perception by some people of the term "social network" as something supernova and the very last is incorrect, - recalls Dmitry Romanov, director of information management technologies development at IT Co.. - In fact, a social network is a set of interactions / relationships between different people that has existed since the emergence of a person as a biological species. And this topic has been actively studied by sociologists since the 1920s and 1930s. Therefore, we can say with absolute confidence that relationships within a social network exist always and everywhere, in any organization and are an integral part of any social structure. At present, it is only a matter of adding another channel of communication between people to existing and new social networks using modern technologies, which allows all information of interactions to be made visible.

Sergei Ryzhikov advises to develop a corporate social network under the motto "His example is science to others": in order to popularize the new tool, it is very important that managers be among the first to post messages on their blogs.

It is advisable to define corporate regulations as soon as possible, which determines that company orders, current information that is of interest to employees (for example, about bonuses) are published only on the corporate portal. It is necessary to transfer documents there from the file server as soon as possible.

However, not all developers of portal solutions are supporters of the idea of \u200b\u200bcreating their own corporate social networks in organizations. Global networks like Facebook are already bringing together employees of the same company, providing them with the necessary opportunities for communication and socialization.

“It will be more logical and more efficient to accurately implement and encapsulate these networks in a corporate portal, providing, of course, the required level of data confidentiality and security,” advises Artak Oganesyan, Deputy General Director of EPAM Systems for Business Development and Customer Relations. - Such a “splicing” will allow employees to communicate in the usual social network, will provide an opportunity to increase the creative and team spirit of their work - by organizing forums, stimulating discussion of ideas and tasks, supporting joint initiatives, and so on. In fact, it will be another tool for feedback (or, better to say, bi-directional) communication between the company represented by its leaders at various levels and employees. "

Mobile, cloud, innovative

With the development of mobile devices (including tablets), remote access to corporate data will be more and more in demand. From this point of view, it is worth noting the active development of the mobile direction of portal technologies, their support for working with mobile devices of various formats and platforms and the associated high expectations of customers regarding the availability of portal solutions via mobile devices. The portal is becoming a single access window and a convenient tool for the work of remote employees: many portal solutions already have an adapted interface for display on mobile devices.

“I think that portals should develop towards increasing mobility,” says Artak Hovhannisyan. - Already, the availability of corporate mail, instant messaging and social networks on smartphones, netbooks and tablets allows employees to constantly be in the information space of the organization. By opening access through such mobile devices to the rest of the portal functions (to corporate information systems, knowledge bases), the company will ensure continuous communication with its personnel and their constant involvement in work processes. So theoretically (from the point of view of technology) an employee will have no obstacles to live all 24 hours a day at work, albeit “virtually”: the opportunity to “work hard” will be limited only by a reasonable time frame that everyone can set for themselves myself. "

Developments of special applications and interfaces for portal services appear to work on the most popular mobile devices, in particular on the iPad.

With the help of such solutions, it is possible to display data from decision support systems, corporate management and analytics systems, monitoring systems on a mobile device in real time, - comments Viktor Komar. - The head of the company, regardless of where he is, with one touch receives on the screen of his mobile device operational data on sales, business analytics, configured for him KPI, and all this quickly, in a beautiful and visual form. He can immediately take the necessary management decision. Such solutions at the intersection of mobile platforms, portal technologies and corporate applications are more and more in demand, they allow you to always keep your finger on the pulse and manage the company very quickly in any situation.

Since in many companies the corporate portal already implements the capabilities of remote access, for employees to work with it from home or during a business trip, the next step in its development can be the organization of interaction with external partners, counterparties, and contractors. There are no technical obstacles and problems to create a special partner zone on the basis of the portal and provide access to up-to-date directories, price lists and other necessary information, to implement the services necessary for partners there.

Dmitry Romanov advises paying attention to Social Network Analysis technologies, which allow visualizing and analyzing internal social interactions in a company. With their help, you can find informal communities of people, identify formal and informal leaders, see how interactions are arranged within and between communities. Technology also makes it possible to analyze how different communication channels are used. Their use makes it possible to really extract a lot of value from the existing picture.

“The fact is that earlier all these processes were invisible for a long time,” explains Dmitry Romanov. - People communicated with each other and sent, at best, paper documents; this interaction was lost and the big picture was difficult, if not impossible, to trace. Now almost all types of communication between people leave traces. And software products of the Social Network Analysis class just allow this information to be observed, made visible, analyzed and used to improve work efficiency. "

In the near future, we can expect the use of the portal's capabilities for visualizing data in a spatial dimension, building on its basis specialized geoinformation services, which may be relevant for transport and logistics companies.

Konstantin Zhukov predicts the development of portal technologies in the "clouds". For small and medium-sized companies, this will allow you to take full advantage of portal solutions without deploying them in your enterprise and without worrying about supporting and maintaining the solution.

Interestingly, according to Sergei Ryzhikov, the segment of video conferencing and IP-telephony is developing: “We expect big changes and an increase in demand in this segment: these technologies allow an organization to do more in less time and increase the efficiency of individual employees and the company as a whole.”

Portal technologies are a "klondike" of new opportunities for a company. Any organization has a lot of interesting data and information. Before the development of portal technologies, there were no interfaces or platforms to find and make available this data. Finding and showing them is the main purpose of the portal. For example, if the company has a document management system, you can do a simple thing - display information on the portal about how many inconsistent documents are "hanging" on which employee, or, for example, publish the performance indicators of departments (you get such kind of online "Boards of honor").

“This information will be of interest to many; there will be an element of competition, perhaps, labor productivity will increase, - believes Viktor Komar. - There is a lot of such data in any company, just not everyone knows how to use it yet. And to do this, you just need to give people access to them, to enable them to compare this data with others. Then users will go to the corporate portal, write to the corporate forum, participate in discussions, ask questions to the management. And the management can hold online and offline meetings. A portal providing two-way communication capabilities is a good tool for closing the distance between management and employees. The management sees what problems the employees are concerned about, and they, in turn, get the opportunity to communicate directly with the top management, bypassing many hierarchical levels. "

Another trend in the field of portal services is related to the fact that companies are more likely to place individual functions of their specialized systems on the portal so that they are available to users in a convenient and understandable form. It is clear that all specialized systems have their own characteristics, their own interface, but employees whose work is not directly related to them have neither the time nor the desire to understand these systems. For them, a simple portal service offering adapted functionality is much more convenient.

The portal allows you to build even a complex business process in an understandable way and helps even an inexperienced user to walk through it step by step, - explains Viktor Komar. - This is a very convenient tool for all employees and beneficial for the company, since resources are saved through the use of a self-service scheme. Moreover, the range of integrated applications and, accordingly, the tasks solved through the portal is very wide: from ordering passes and a projector up to working with SAP and analytical systems. In the latter case, the organization of access through the portal to corporate applications allows you to save on the payment of licenses for workplaces. And the more employees you need to give access to the data of a particular application, the greater the savings.

Each chef has his own signature recipes. And only he knows in what seasoning, mood or melody sounding during preparation, the secret of an excellent dish lies. It is the same in business - each manager has his own management methods, each company has its own "kitchen". Can a corporate social network become the main ingredient of a dish, or does it remain a pleasant, but not necessary, decoration? Like a rose on a cake, say ...

Many companies block access to social networks during working hours. Others, on the other hand, launch their own networks, encouraging communication between employees on professional and personal issues. Opinions about the need for implementation may also differ: someone sees only advantages in the fact that employees always stay in touch and are involved in the process at any time, someone, on the contrary, believes that social networks distract employees from performing their main duties and you can do fine without them. However, both of them recognize that social networks are a powerful trend in communication, not only in private life, but also in corporate life.

According to Andrey Dankevich, Marketing Director of DaOffice, a Russian corporate social network, this is a full-fledged business tool, but even before its implementation in the company, it is very important to clearly understand what the result should be. For example, the task is to quickly adapt new employees. In this case, a corporate social network perfectly complements traditional training systems (distance or face-to-face trainings, courses, seminars, etc.) with the emergence of social ties. For example, mentoring is developing - more experienced employees help newcomers by answering their questions on social networks, an adaptation program begins to work, and this applies not only to skills, product knowledge or the ability to serve a customer, but also adaptation within the team. A person immediately becomes a participant and a member of the team, while it is quite easy to understand how much he joined the team and whether he is ready to interact with colleagues.

Innovation management

The corporate network is a good tool for socialization, however, according to experts, it is important that this does not become an end in itself. Elements of social networks can be integrated into other IT systems so that users can be involved in existing business processes.

Take the innovation management system as an example. In many modern companies, the collection of ideas from employees is present in one way or another. In this case, a corporate social network can be used as a tool for the initial collection of ideas from employees and further transfer of data to a "large" system for managing ideas and innovations. The benefit of such integration is that each of the systems does its own thing. An easy-to-use KSS generates a large flow of ideas through greater employee engagement, and complex expertise is done through a complete innovation management system. In addition, the corporate social network makes the process of submitting and voting for ideas open and transparent. Thus, the company becomes more innovative and involves employees in business change processes. This, on the one hand, gives a great advantage for the business, since it becomes possible to implement those changes that are useful and important for employees, and on the other hand, it is an additional motivation for them. "My idea has been implemented, I have contributed to the development of the company" - this is a very strong motivator.

This point of view is supported by Alexandra Popova, Leading Specialist of the Internal Communications Department of CJSC JSCB "Russlavbank" . In her opinion, the value of a corporate social network lies in the fact that involving employees in solving important issues motivates everyone to reveal their own potential. “It can also be noted that employees have a sense of responsibility for the business, which allows them to look at the company through the eyes of the owner and learn to make important decisions based on the benefits to the organization,” she sums up.

Communication problem

In general, there are a lot of systems with which KCC can be integrated. However, here it is very important to choose exactly those with which integration will be really in demand, turning KSS from just an environment for communications into an environment for increasing the efficiency of employees.

The social network letobook, introduced in OJSC "Leto Bank", has become such an environment for increasing the efficiency of employees. The social network here is the main and main carrier of all information that is generated within the bank, and is used, first of all, to optimize and improve work processes - all internal processes, from issuing new uniforms to employees to calculating interest on a loan, are discussed in the public domain. networks. All ideas are accepted for consideration, those that are really worth to be implemented are implemented, the authors of ideas receive gratitude from the first persons, and this is a powerful stimulating and motivational program.

“For us, letobook has become an excellent platform for communication in all directions, both horizontally between colleagues from different departments and regions, and vertically between employees and bank management. Thanks to this, we not only know what is happening in all corners of our network, but also can promptly signal our problems, respond to these signals, discuss possible options for the development of a particular situation and make optimal decisions.We were able to avoid the isolation of the head office and top management of the bank from the real aspirations and problems of employees of our regional points of sale - that is, to get away from a common communication problem of all large federal-scale companies. In the social network, the entire inner life of the bank is visible at a glance, any event, any difficulty immediately becomes public knowledge, and this is a huge power and great opportunities for development and improvement, "says Alina Morozova , leader in internal com communications and Internet projects of OJSC "Leto Bank".

87% of the bank's employees are registered in the letobook network. From 27 to 50% of them use the network every day.

Overall efficiency

Sofya Semenova, head of internal communications and brand of Volvo Group, believes that corporate social network is an excellent tool for managing and motivating staff, as well as for organizing joint work on projects, storing and sharing information, and managing knowledge within an organization. "The corporate social network brings all the advantages of social networks to the business environment: speed of information exchange, intuitive simplicity and accessibility, user-friendly interface, support for mobile devices, flexible subscription tool, the ability to ask for advice, ease of creating new contacts, use of a knowledge base in public access and collective intelligence for solving problems ", - notes Sofya Semenova.