When I was a kid, both my parents smoked cigarettes. (Which may be the single biggest reason why I don't. Thanks, Mom and Dad!) One of my earliest memories is the sight of my father reaching for his red pack of Pall Malls. (Because filtered cigarettes were for girls. And sissies. It was the late 1950s and early 1960s, after all.)
I was thinking about collaboration recently, and the slogan that appeared on every pack of Pall Mall reds suddenly snapped into my mind. That slogan, as shown here: "Wherever particular people congregate." (Image source: http://kraftstobaccoblog.wordpress.com.)
So exactly where is that these days?
Increasingly, the dominant answer is "online." Sure, there are great venues at which you and your colleagues can and do congregate in person, and to great effect and mutual benefit. (I'm thinking particularly about Knowledge14 and ServiceNow User Groups (SNUGs).) But as you doubtless experience each and every working day, many if not most of your most important collaborations take place online.
Sadly, many of these are still occurring via e-mail, perhaps the least efficient, least truly collaborative and least economically justifiable mode of electronic communications. Or, as ServiceNow CEO says far more pithily, e-mail "sucks."
Still not convinced? Check out this wonderful infographic, "The Staggering Cost of Business Email." Then ask yourself if life is really any different at your organization.
So what's better? Why, social collaboration. Collaboration features that are built into the applications you already use to do work. Features that make it easy to ask and answer questions, build, search and maintain knowledge repositories and share what you know and learn with others. And to track the progress of each and every inquiry, across its entire life span. In ways that are easy to replicate, scale, modify and improve. And that reduce costs, improve responsiveness, and make users, customers and the IT teams supporting them happier and more productive.
These are the goals of the social collaboration features built into the ServiceNow Service Automation Platform. And those features mean that every application running on that platform is already enabled for social collaboration, whether that application is created by ServiceNow, its partners or by customers themselves. Just one of the reasons why the ServiceNow platform — and the customers and creators using it — are so very "BAADaaS."
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat and other cloud-based social collaboration tools are already supplanting e-mail (and phone calls), in the consumer world and even among business users. And enterprise social collaboration options are growing in number and improving in usability, flexibility and security. So if you're not putting social collaboration to work at your enterprise, why not? It's only a matter of time until it arrives where you work. Why not be part of the group that welcomes it and accelerates its adoption? You're already reading and sending too many e-mails anyway…
