{"id":18920,"date":"2014-10-09T12:39:50","date_gmt":"2014-10-09T12:39:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/enterprisestrategies.com\/?p=18920"},"modified":"2015-07-30T14:33:08","modified_gmt":"2015-07-30T14:33:08","slug":"yammer-chatter-others-doomed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/enterprisestrategies.com\/2014\/10\/09\/yammer-chatter-others-doomed\/","title":{"rendered":"Are Yammer, Chatter and others in Trouble?"},"content":{"rendered":"

It is no secret that I am huge proponent of, and believer in the power of, Enterprise Social Networks (ESNs). Being the Founder of a company that helps organizations implement and drive usage of various types of ESNs (e.g., Yammer, Chatter, etc.), I am also very careful to be technology neutral. We have to be — in terms of scale, we are a rounding error on the lunch budget of one of those company\u2019s executives. All this said, I have been watching a situation develop over the last couple of years, and I think it is now appropriate to share it with our readers. I ask that you please view this post in the way that it was intended, as an observation from an Enterprise Social Network nerd who has been studying this space for the last 5 years. Here goes…<\/p>\n

Background<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Right about the time I left Oracle, a little more than 5 years ago, they were just starting to use a homegrown internal social network, named not so creatively Oracle Social Network (OSN). It was a Facebook-style internal collaboration platform, a pet project of one of the development teams, and while well-intentioned, a bit clunky. I did not think much of it.<\/p>\n

Fast forward 5 years…<\/p>\n

Oracle Social Network (Silently) Hits the Market<\/strong><\/h2>\n

With the release of Oracle\u2019s Version 7 Cloud Applications, Oracle started making OSN available to their customers. I was invited, by a good friend and former co-worker of mine, David Christopher, Director of EMEA Social Business Programs, to see a demo. What I saw was not the OSN of five years prior, but instead a fully functional, well-designed ESN, seamlessly integrated with some of Oracle\u2019s cloud enterprise business applications (e.g., HCM, ERP, the best CRMs<\/a>, etc.). In essence, while my company had been out preaching to others the importance of integrating internal social networks with critical business systems (and watching other software companies fail to do this), Oracle had been quietly developing exactly that. I knew immediately this was significant, but in fairness, it remained to be seen how Oracle would position this product. And, to be completely honest and transparent, I have been extremely critical of Oracle in the past. Here is where I think things currently stand and why, if done with attention and aggression, Oracle\u2019s Social Network could eliminate the need for other internal social networks at Oracle Cloud clients.<\/p>\n

Focusing Social on Real Business Processes (e.g., Solving the Problem of Context)<\/strong><\/h2>\n

For the last 5 years we (Enterprise Strategies) have witnessed firsthand the importance of having your internal social network integrated with real business processes. Our encounters have ranged from the comical, such as when a new client informed us that the most commented, liked and shared post on their previous (before us) ESN was, \u201cDoes anyone have a good recipe for guacamole?\u201d to the conclusive, such as when we implemented a new ESN at that same client and drove usage and adoption 10-fold in 6 months by tying it to their sales processes and data. Quite frankly, one of the main reasons that Enterprise Social Networks fail is Lack of Context<\/a>.<\/em>
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\"Top<\/a>Free Download: Top 5 Reasons Enterprise Social Initiatives Fail<\/h2>\n

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In this download, you will find the following information:<\/p>\n