I’ve been using Salesforce Chatter for a few years now, I’ve also used other so-called enterprise social tools – Yammer and Socialcast for instance. While these tools are useful for small teams directly engaged in projects, it has always struck me that there is a lot of value left on the table when it comes to delivering insights to users across large organizations – the sort of aspirational use case that enterprise 2.0 pundits talk about – discovering relevant data across mass organizations as a way to drive efficiencies and the like. I predict in fact that enterprise social tools will eventfully deliver an analytics element alongside the core communications offering, once large enough organizations adopt the tools it will be a core requirement.
Indicee is coming to the part early. Indicee is a cloud business intelligence vendor that seeks to put BI tools, formerly the domain of high level employees, into the hands of regular business users. They do so by delivering extensible analytics applications through partners – often white-labeling the applications for specific vendors. Indicee is launching today Analytics for Salesforce Chatter, an add-on available on the AppExchange. The tool is integrated directly into the salesforce user dashboard and delivers customizable dashboards to measure campaigns, identify top users and general analyze the masses of data streaming on a social network to deliver value to users.
The long heralded “social enterprise”, while an aspirational term, has yet to really deliver quantifiable outcomes across large businesses. Part of the reason for this is that these businesses suffer from two distinct traits;
- Slow adoption at the early stages (hence little content and thus value)
- Too much noise at a later stage (hence too much data and difficulty for users in filtering)
I believe that the key opportunity for social enterprise tools is in the delivery of fine grained analytics that help end users to bubble up the most relevant and important data. While some would argue that this is achievable through specifically following key-words or people, my belief is that this only goes a little way of what is required and it is through hands off analytics that the real value will be delivered to the organization.
It strikes me however that this sort of analysis should be a core part of the social enterprise product and is sub-optimally delivered as an add-on. To that end, while I like where Indicee is going with this, I would prefer (and suspect that in time it will eventuate) that Salesforce will deliver this functionality as part of the core platform.
(Cross-posted @ The Diversity Blog – SaaS, Cloud & Business Strategy)