Chatter Will Change the Way We Work & the Way We Train

Just watched the webcast of Benioff’s Dreamforce keynote announcing Chatter, and think it will be a game changer: the barriers to entry for Enterprise 2.0 have just been blown away.

What is Chatter

Simply put, Chatter is “Facebook” for the enterprise, offering real-time feeds, integration, and collaboration between content, apps, and people. It provides all of the baseline features of social networking tools like Twitter and Faceboook, such as status updates and profiles. It allows you to follow people and to easily create, join, and follow groups. Far beyond connecting people, it also tracks and streams updates to apps and Salesforce objects. For instance, a change to the status of an opportunity would make it to the global feed, be clickable, and take you to a filtered feed specific to that opportunity. Similarly, you can bring in updates from non-Salesforce applications such as back-end finance or HR systems (easy and contextualized access to SAP data appeal to anyone?), as well as external public feeds from sources like Twitter. Finally, it enables you to link and access content inline, and makes all of this available (including access to all your content and data) via mobile devices. You can read about Chatter features on Salesforce’s site, here and view a helpful YouTube video about it here. Also, Appirio has put out a thoughtful blog post on the enterprise implications of Chatter here.


Update: And check out how Appirio will be leveraging Chatter in their Professional Service Enterprise product built on Force.com here - a great example of how the cloud exponentially speeds up innovation and time to market.

How Chatter lowers the barriers to Enterprise 2.0

I was following the Twitter back-channel during Benioff’s announcement (check out #df09, and filter on “chatter”), and initial reactions ran the gamut from awed to underwhelmed to irritated – calling out similar technologies that have been around for some time (such as Yammer), and wondering how status updates could be hyped as a “breakthrough.” And at first blush, this doesn’t look particularly new. What I believe is truly disruptive about Chatter, though, is the ease of entry that it offers, and the way it overcomes three of the major barriers to implementing “Enterprise 2.0”: access, context, and security.

• Access: Choosing, configuring, and rolling out a technology (or technologies) can be daunting and costly, even if you have stellar IT support. In contrast, once released, Chatter will be included free in all versions of Salesforce (both the Sales Cloud and Services Cloud) as part of the CRM license, and Salesforce will also introduce a low-cost Chatter Edition for non-Salesforce users.
• Context: Enterprise social networking and social media are next to useless and potentially even a counter-productive time-suck without a business context. Embedding it in CRM, making it easy to access and filter updates and content within the context of real-time sales and services needs provides authentic utility and instant value to organizations that may be struggling with where, when, and how to introduce these types of tools.
• Security: Fear of losing control and the ability to lock down who sees what is a common concern when it comes to introducing social media in the enterprise. Regardless of whether this concern is legitimate or misguided, it has been a barrier to entry. Salesforce overcomes this with its robust and proven security model which extends to Chatter down to the object level, as desired. Presumably, you will be able to define and implement the level of security you need, with little extra effort.

How Chatter will change our work and productivity

If they deliver on the hype, Chatter will enable:

• Real-time integrated access to expert advice, data, and content (internal and external to the org)
• Ease of collaboration for teams and ad hoc groups
• Quick aggregation and filtering of content in the context of critical business processes

And likely much more. Still pondering the depth of the implications of these in terms of making it easier for us to do our jobs well. But essentially, Chatter is a promise to help people get to what they need when they need it, which, at the end of the day, can have a massive impact on productivity.

Implications for enterprise learning

The immediate impact on T&D will be the need to help facilitate adoption, since Chatter brings with it some fundamental changes in how organizations and people can interact and do business. But there are also broader implications. I believe enterprise learning has been undergoing a metamorphosis for some time, and Chatter both underscores the necessity of it, and is likely to speed up the process. If we haven’t already, we will need to move away from being content creators and disseminators and move instead towards being productivity analysts and enablers. Content is out there. Our job will shift to helping people find it and share it, to looking for emergent trends, identifying what should be formalized and disintermediating what should not. It will be about identifying issues that impact performance and helping to facilitating their resolution. And most importantly, it will be much more focused on helping people perform well together than on “improving” the individual. That’s a pretty massive cultural shift. Are we up for it?

~ posted by Beth Chmielowski on 18 Nov 09
   tagged as: #df09, Chatter, Salesforce, social learning, social media

 

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