Earlier
this week, I published a blog outlining my top 5 social collaboration vendor trends for 2016, with number #4 focused on
the continued investment by collaboration vendors in providing integration with
other technologies, in three particular areas:
It's an
area of capability that I've long been championing with vendors, because I
believe integration is one of the key attributes that will help social
collaboration technologies become more widely adopted within organisations.
Interestingly, it's often not top of the list of priorities for organisations
selecting their social collaboration tool in the beginning, but as the
initiative matures, and the organisation becomes clearer in the ways in which
the tool can add value across the business, the importance of integration
increases dramatically. Part of this is to improve ease-of-adoption, for
example to enable the collaboration tool to be inserted more naturally into the
individual's day-to-day activities (making it harder to avoid), for example bringing
conversations to them via email, or in their most-used business application, as
described in the extract above. But ultimately this is about embedding
collaboration into their daily routine, making it something that is not
additive to what they need to do, but an integral part of it. It comes back to
the idea that better collaboration is about bringing about cultural change,
shifting the mindset of leaders and employees alike to recognise the power and
benefits of a
more open, interactive way of working, and to do it without thinking about
it.
In terms
of vendors' commitment to this need for broad integration support, it's perhaps
not surprising that it's been the application and infrastructure vendors (see
my social collaboration vendor landscape report for an overview of the key groups of
suppliers in this space) that have been key innovators here; their
prioritisation of integrating social collaboration with their own business
applications (e.g. Salesforce, Oracle & SAP) or integration technologies
(e.g. TIBCO) is clearly a no-brainer in the context of their own upselling and
cross-selling opportunities, but it has helped to provide focus around some of
the key use cases for social collaboration within organisations, and has driven
other players to provide comparable integrations.
It's true
that there's still plenty of room for improvement across the board, but as the
emphasis on specific use cases for social collaboration in vendor marketing and
sales strategies increases, integration in all its guises will remain a vital
investment priority for vendors. And that is very welcome indeed.
#Collaboration #socialcollaboration