Social Business Processes Come To Small-Medium Businesses

When we speak of social business systems integrated with enterprise processes, people tend to imagine large company that is undertaking a significant project to transform some aspect of their business. Many vendors aim products for large businesses with many thousands of employees or people participating in the activity. It is certainly possible for large enterprises, but what about Small-Medium businesses? Is there a place for something a futuristic as a social business process in a company of less than 100 people of the same level of quality as the big customers?

n speaking to Ulf-Jost Kossol of T-Systems Multi Media Solutions (MMS), a 1200-employee digital solutions firm and systems integrator headquartered in Dresden Germany, it is very possible to bring social business processes, given a good platform that is designed for integration. T-Systems helped a German IT management and technical consultancy,ITARICON GmbH, to transform their sales processes to accelerate the on-boarding of salespeople and consultants into new projects. They wanted to improve the value that the sales people brought to their complex customer engagements, through improving sales enablement and collaboration skills.

Ulf-Jost Kossol, Head of Social Business Technology, T-Systems Multi Media Solutions

It began with SAP Jam Work Patterns, SAP’s platform that goes beyond providing collaboration tools alone; they actually help frame the collaboration spaces and steps within the larger context of specific business processes. T-Systems, the integrator, helped the customer ITARICON, implement two social process models of Opportunity groups, and Deal rooms, for each customer project.

The opportunity groups are open spaces for anyone in the company to be able to learn about the customer, their project, and share their knowledge. The Deal rooms are closed groups especially for the core team working on customer confidential information. In turn, both models are integrated with their customer database in SugarCRM.

The SAP Jam environment allows anyone in ITARICON to set up new groups based on these models rapidly, which in turn brings in the layer of social functions (discussion areas, profiles of who is involved, documents, etc.) By taking this modeling approach, it becomes much simpler for a non-technical person to get together the records and bring in the capabilities that allow teams to collaborate.

It is a far cry from the days where you needed an IT person to deploy and set everything up for you before you can put it to use. With the groups, sales people can make decisions or react to customers faster, while also keeping others in the company aware of their overall activities.

The wonder in all of this is that it didn’t take a complex installation. According to Mr. Kossol, the heavy technical work of integration and implementation to create such a system only took about 10 days of work. This is lightning fast for an IT project to come to life. The SAP Jam platform made it easy to create and deploy such custom models and social business processes. ITARICON expanded it company wide after only a 3-month pilot with a few teams.

This is the acceleration that the social business space needs. Changing the culture of an organization takes years, but changing common processes and actions doesn’t need to do so. The ability to make agile changes to processes and put them in the hands of users is what really highlights the value of enterprise social networks.

SOURCE: Forbes