A recurring theme you will see here is that companies can significantly increase the value of their various social software applications by tying them together. A second theme that is seen in the market is the need for hard dollar ROI for social computing.
With that introduction, I’d like to relate a story we heard from one of our customers. This company saved $50,000 because of its Connectbeam implementation. Here’s a bulleted summary of the story:
- An employee created a wiki page explaining how to get a discount on software
- Wiki page was shared on Connectbeam
- Employees in other departments Googled the name of the software app
- The wiki page was returned alongside the Google search results
- Other employees clicked on the link to the wiki page, learning how to get the discount
- Result = $50,000 savings to the company
The Full Story Large enterprises have thousands of employees, dozens of departments and multiple locations around the globe. Coordination can be quite challenging. And unsurprisingly, valuable information that can help others is often not found, costing companies real money and lost productivity. Our customer has an enterprise wiki. Wikis are fantastic for letting employees share knowledge and collaborate on projects. An employee created a wiki page explaining how to purchase software from a third party vendor. This employee’s department uses a third party software application extensively, and had negotiated a favorable departmental vendor license agreement (VLA) over time. The employee’s wiki page explained the details around this VLA. The employee’s wiki page also was shared into the Connectbeam application. There are two ways to do this – bookmark the page, or leverage Connectbeam’s integration with Confluence. Now it turns out that this software was getting interest elsewhere in the organization. In the absence of knowing about the departmental VLA, others would have negotiated new VLAs with the software vendor, at full price. So here was the problem. Highly valuable information was on the wiki. Employees needed this information, but it didn’t occur to them that others in the organization might know something about it. Instead, they did what a lot of us do – they turned to Google. And here’s where Connectbeam kicked in. Connectbeam can integrate with any search engine. When employees search, they are presented not only results from that site, but results from Connectbeam as well. Here’s a screenshot of how that works:
Employees elsewhere in this company were presented with a similar search side panel of results from its Connectbeam application. And the original employee’s wiki entry for the software VLA was included in the Connectbeam search results.
They clicked on the wiki entry describing how to buy the software, and were able to tap into the departmental VLA to get the discount. Result? $50,000 saved by the company that otherwise would have gone to the software vendor.
Putting Information In the Flow of Daily Work
When we discussed the ‘why’ behind the release of Spotlight 3.0, we highlighted the following elements:
- In the flow: put information where employees do their work
- Connect enterprise apps: need to make it easier to find the incredibly valuable information employees create everyday
As you can see from this case study, there are real opportunities for companies to improve results when they make it happen.
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