Executive Summary
Why Companies Need to Integrate Social Communications into Line-of-Business Processes
The transformation of business processes with social media is changing the way companies operate. Traditional business communications, which relied on emails, messaging, meetings and telephone calls, has given way to a new business model empowered by social communications and includes features such as sharing employee profiles and activity streams, wikis, communities of interest, document sharing, micro- blogging and much more. These technologies transform the work environment by promoting collaboration with colleagues, resulting in fresh insight, continuous innovation and product improvement. Information Technology (IT) managers play an important role in this social technical revolution, as they must enable and manage the infrastructure to support social communications, collect business intelligence on its use and integrate the applications to deliver seamless connectivity. However, many companies currently support only a few social communications capabilities, which are not integrated into core business processes, limiting its full potential. This report offers insight into the key benefits of an integrated social platform and offers suggestions for moving forward to create a social business.