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Supporting Seamless Social Workflow: Weaving Salesforce Chatter into Business Processes and Applications Accenture Technology Labs
Seamless Collaboration for Team Coordination Organizations need to rethink how to use digital collaboration technologies to help teammates coordinate their efforts as they co-create complex work products, such as sales proposals, product specifications or marketing plans. Done successfully, this allows for more efficient hand-offs, less rework, better throughput and ultimately higher quality work.For a team of two co-located people working on a simple project, little technology support may be needed. But things get more challenging when the work efforts become more complex and the teams become larger, or more distributed. With complex geographic distribution now the norm, modern enterprises are reimagining how to weave collaboration technologies seamlessly into day-to-day processes and the applications that support them.
From Collaboration Channels to Social Workflow The latest digital collaboration technologies, like Chatter™, offer exciting new ways to help such teams share ideas, stay informed and coordinate. However, experience has shown that merely deploying these technologies is not usually sufficient to drive effective adoption or measurable impact because they are added on versus integrated. To get real value, organizations must embed social technologies into business processes—making work itself more social, and turning social platforms into the tools used to do work rather than just talk about it. In concrete terms, this means that
rather than deploying collaboration technologies as a set of isolated channels, the high-performing digital business needs to embed these technologies seamlessly into their core business processes. This includes both the formal, industrialized processes handled by traditional workflow engines, and the loosely-defined processes that knowledge workers use to do the complex, creative work of producing spreadsheets, presentations and written documents. Although these processes cannot be driven by a simple, rigid workflow engine, they can benefit from a more flexible workflow, which provides high-level guidance about major milestones. And to really support complex knowledge work, that lightweight workflow—or social workflow—engine must embed mechanisms that make it easy to share progress against that workflow, raise questions and issues about the execution, and discuss the work in progress in an organized way.
Team Coordination ChallengesThe ability to support effective coordination around the co creation of complex work-products is absolutely critical for today’s high-performing businesses. For example, a product company’s effective coordination of team members to not only design a product, but also package it and get it on the shelf is critical to the timely introduction of a great product. Be it marketing plans, product roadmaps or legal contracts, creation of complex work products usually involves a team of professionals who each
work on their own areas, while needing to exchange ideas and feedback and stay synchronized. Unfortunately, coordinating the creation of complex work products can be challenging. Problems include defining and communicating a process the team will follow, tracking progress on the process, maintaining awareness of the work that team-mates are doing, sharing ideas about how the direction might need to change, and quickly resolving issues. The team may be geographically distributed, further complicating collaboration.
A Team Coordination ToolkitAccenture Technology Labs has teamed with Salesforce.com, Inc.'s Chatter to support team coordination, bring order to the process of distributed co-authoring, help reduce the cost of keeping teammates in synch, and ultimately increase throughput while improving quality.
The prototype Team Coordination toolkit layers simple Social Workflows on the Chatter social collaboration platform. It integrates lightweight process support, embedded into the tools used to create and store the work created by the team. The toolkit comprises the following key components:
The social network: Chatter groups are defined for each project to support discussion of the work products being produced.
Social workflow and structured updates: Teams can easily announce progress through pre-defined and customizable steps in the workflow, and easily raise issues
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that have come up in a standardized, structured way without having to individually type every message. This is called structured updates.
The toolkit offers a social workflow editor database that allows the project owner to define, store and share the workflow steps and other structured update types that the team will use to coordinate.
Integration of social workflow into Microsoft® Office applications: The toolkit offers a plug-in that integrates collaboration directly into Microsoft® PowerPoint® (other Microsoft® Office applications are planned). It adds a sidebar that connects you and your team to all relevant social feeds about your organization, your team and your work (see Figure 1). A toolbar allows you to socialize various aspects of the work product through Chatter. It allows you to socialize
anything from the whole document to individual parts of the document, such as an individual slide or a comment. Structured updates support awareness of your activities to keep your team in synch around your project’s workflow. The feeds generated can be consumed in any Chatter client (as in Figure 2) or in the Microsoft® Office sidebar.
Social integration into Microsoft® SharePoint® team site: The toolkit’s functionality also extends to a Microsoft® SharePoint® team site where you manage the team’s work in progress. It embeds social feeds about each of the documents that the team is working on, and supports the same team-specific structured updates as supported from Microsoft® Office (see Figure 3). Chatter, Microsoft® Office, and Microsoft® SharePoint® are thus integrated into a social workflow suite.
Figure 1: TThe figure shows the team coordination toolkit directly integrated into Microsoft® PowerPoint®. The team coordination toolkit adds a side bar that helps connect you and your team to all relevant Chatter feeds about your organization, your team and your work. The team coordination toolkit also provides a ribbon that allows the user to utilize its various functionalities like socializing slides and providing structured updates.
What is Social Workflow?Social workflow is a term Accenture coined to define lightweight, flexible processes that involve a lot of social interaction between the participants. Traditional workflow engines are great for supporting large, heavyweight processes made up of many small steps, each of which is routine. The workflow engine supports management and execution of a highly-structured process, shuttling documents around for content submission.
Processes involved in creating complex work products do not usually involve much traditional workflow. The processes are more ad-hoc, and the individual steps often require a lot of back-and-forth discussion. The idea of social workflow is to integrate social technologies, like Chatter, into business applications used to execute the steps of a process, and to structure the use of the social channel to provide explicit support for the process.
Conclusion Workers do not need to become more social, it is the work processes and applicationss that do. By mastering the concepts of social workflow, and the techniques for weaving social technologies into every-day applications and processes, organizations can reduce the pain of endeavors that require coordinating teams around the creation of complex work products.
The team coordination toolkit from Accenture Technology Labs is designed to enable organizations to push Chatter-based social workflow into the fabric of everyday work. It allows teams to collaborate seamlessly around co-creation processes without leaving the applications that team members already use to create those work products, improve throughput and quality by leveraging digital technologies that increase situational awareness, and reduce communication overhead so that each member of the team can concentrate on their role.
Figure 2: The figure shows messages from the team coordination toolkit displayed on the Chatter group created to support discussion of the work products being produced.
Figure 3: The team coordination toolkit can integrate directly into Microsoft® SharePoint® team sites allowing you to take advantage of your existing Microsoft® SharePoint® platform. First, the team coordination toolkit embeds the general Chatter feed directly into a Microsoft® SharePoint® team site (bottom right). Additionally, the team coordination toolkit embeds customized, document-based Chatter feeds that allow you to browse your Chatter feeds related to particular documents based on documents in your team site.
About AccentureAccenture is a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company, with more than 261,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries. Combining unparalleled experience, comprehensive capabilities across all industries and business functions, and extensive research on the world’s most successful companies, Accenture collaborates with clients to help them become high-performance businesses and governments. The company generated net revenues of US$27.9 billion for the fiscal year ended Aug. 31, 2012. Its home page is www.accenture.com.
Contacts To find out more, please contact: Manish MehtaAccenture Technology [email protected]
Alex KassAccenture Technology [email protected]
Gurdeep VirdiAccenture Technology [email protected]
About Accenture Technology LabsAccenture Technology Labs, the dedicated technology research and development (R&D) organization within Accenture, has been turning technology innovation into business results for more than 20 years. Our R&D team explores new and emerging technologies to create a vision of how technology will shape the future and invent the next wave of cutting-edge business solutions. Working closely with Accenture’s global network of specialists, Accenture Technology Labs help clients innovate to achieve high performance. The Labs are located in Silicon Valley, California; Sophia Antipolis, France; Arlington, Virginia; Beijing, China and Bangalore, India. For more information, please visit:www.accenture.com/accenturetechlabs
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