Enterprises fail to meet the true potential of social technology

BANGALORE, INDIA: Being social has been a game changer startegy for many companies in the recent past. Yet failing to adapt the social technology platform, has left quite a few players behind the race who are still trying to catch up but have not emerged yet.

Neeraj Kaushik, vice president, Apps, Oracle India, shares  his perspective on how big an impact it has created for the organisations and the reasons why the companies are failing to identify and ultilise the benefits of the social platform.

CIOL: How is the social reality changing for organizations?

Neeraj Kaushik: Social media is a reality for all organizations – whether you are ready to embrace it or not. Most are aware of the benefits of using social/collaborative technologies internally - like improved productivity, engagement, innovation, streamlining communication, and facilitating collaboration. All of which break down traditional silos and bring previously unknown knowledge and expertise to the “extended networked enterprise”.

Most enterprises however do not have a deliberate or successful approach for using social technologies internally in support of their strategy. Because they have not addressed the barriers to adoption, enabled the right technologies, or perhaps most importantly, correlated their efforts to actual business results. Mobile adoption fuels social reality. This killer combination gives progressive organizations the ability to minimize transactional headaches and embrace the true power of social media.

CIOL: What are the main reasons that most companies are unable to utilize social completely?

NK: More and more companies are using social media and most are reporting some benefit, but the true potential is largely unmet. Why? The reasons are multifold, but generally fall into the following major categories: Lack of participation – There are enough barriers to adoption that participation in social technologies in many companies is still very low. Low participation greatly reduces the value of social and creates a downward spiral: if there is insufficient participation, newcomers cannot find what they are looking for and leave to never return. Inefficient utilization – You can have participation, but the tools used can be the wrong ones or not very good at facilitating collaboration, which makes participants have to put forth more effort than necessary to get their work done. Ineffective collaboration – People can participate and collaborate in social, but all their energies can still end up not effectively contributing to the achievement of business objectives.

This happens because the connection between collaboration efforts and business objectives is too tenuous. Obviously, these reasons are interconnected; if the tools are inefficient, or the collaboration ineffective, the social efforts will eventually falter or at least not gain traction, which can result in a vicious circle of low participation leading to ineffective collaboration leading to benefits not being realized leading back to low participation.

CIOL: How does Social affect the HR of an organization? What possible benefits that an organization reap from social?

NK: Social networks offer tremendous benefits to employees—and to the business. However, with so many networks being used in an organization, it’s important to have a single solution that can provide the leadership and interoperability with other social networks and prevent the erosion of those benefits. Work environments that provide social capabilities to employees experience benefits that include

• Easier collaboration among employees

• More-targeted mentoring

• More ad hoc learning

• On-the-fly innovation

• Increased participation in the workplace

• Problem solving instead of finger pointing

• Shared ownership of products and projects

• Satisfied customers

• Happier employees

The effect that these benefits can have on the productivity and success of employees is reflected in increased employee engagement and in the bottom line.

CIOL: What makes Oracle HCM solution different from others?

NK: What makes Oracle HCM applications different is that rather than having either a separate or generic, non-collaboration area, the Oracle social platform displays the conversations in the application platform UI shell that are contextually related to the business process or business object being manipulated in the application.This enables easy access by users to the conversations that will help access expertise, answer their questions, provide updates to their social network, and make them more productive. They can do this without having to leave the application context, thus avoiding any breach of focus on the task at hand. Embedding social in applications improves the overall experience and performance of people who use the applications. It’s important to note however, that it is unlikely that on its own, embedding social in the application will start causing people to use applications they otherwise would not normally use – this is more about making existing users more productive.

CIOL: What role does cloud has to play in HCM?

NK: More and more employees, both in functional as well as sales and production roles, want to access their work through mobile devices. Mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets offer greater freedom and versatility to users, freeing them from being tied to their desktop computers, and even their laptops as well. Given that social network usage has also increased through the use of mobile devices, it’s not surprising to see an overlap where employees frequently wish to access their social network to get updates, find answers, etc. in order to help them get their work done and accomplish goals.

The Social HCM Cloud improves the experience for users by embedding the business context into OSN conversations. This enables users to focus on the collaboration aspects of getting their work done, for example: finding expertise, getting answers to questions, and updating their colleagues.Oracle’s Social HCM Cloud fully realizes the potential for social technologies to generate superior business performance for companies. It addresses the participation, efficiency, and effectiveness obstacles that have previously stymied social adoption efforts through the embedding of Oracle’s social platform into the existing application suite as well as the integration of net new social applications into the existing suite.

Some of our HCM customers will also be present for the Oracle CloudWorld in Mumbai this year and talk about the experience that they have had with this solution. CloudWorld is Oracle’s marquee cloud event where customers, partners and Oracle executives share insights on Oracle’s cloud business in the country. Oracle’s social solutions form a separate track in at CloudWorld which goes to show the momentum and demand that we are observing for our social technologies.