It is only recently that IT industry leaders started to develop software applications that are doing exactly what people expect from them. Anthropologically, Google, and Facebook are already functions of human nature. Previously, software products facilitated only business processes, like solving a problem, and enable certain transactions and management processes. Today, people want to socialize via Facebook and look for stuff via Google’s organic search.
When smaller companies allow their staff to run wild on Twitter and Facebook, bigger companies take control of the situation in their hands. This is the case when enterprise resource planning (ERP) and other enterprise software come to help. These systems reproduce the functionality of contemporary social networks inside the enterprise system. Whatever business there used to be going on outside enterprise system, now is going on inside. An Enterprise 2.0 system can bring benefits to any big company.
There are three main reasons why Enterprise 2.0 systems are beneficial to your business.
1. A good deal of all communication is already going on within social media. This sort of communication lacks the security and record capabilities of the contemporary ERP systems.
2. Keeping records can become even more important since the industrial workforce seems to shrink nowadays, which is especially true in the case of those senior old-school engineers. An ERP system can be capable of retaining the vital and original know-hows for the next generations of employees.
3. A wiki format can become a great way to structure complex information in such areas as engineering, supply chain, project management among others. A wiki format allows not only storing information but also tracing back all changes.
When the advantages of an ERP system with Enterprise 2.0 features become obvious, a question arises about how to get from it what you need and want. What you need from the successful integration of an ERP system into your corporate IT infrastructure are basically two things: the ability to search all social media data and the ability to link any data piece to any social media interaction.
Keep in mind the essential division between synchronous (chat, messenger, IP telephony, etc.) and asynchronous (wiki, blog, forum, etc.) communication and make sure that your ERP system can do both in the most convenient and secure manner, which allows not only to document the organizational memory but also to scale communication to any group of employees.
Social media do not seem to lose their audience and are here for good. They can be a big distraction in the workspace and for this reason, many companies limit access to Facebook from the in-house computers. But at the same time, social media functionality can be put to use with the help of an ERP system. Managers will have more and better information, security issues will be addressed and employees will use to the better end what used to drain their productivity.
