Last month I attended Forrester's Content & Collaboration Forum 2011. The Forum explored what the “current demand for more portable, social workplace experiences means for your workplace strategy.” It shared the “latest trends in technology adoption and how firms forge better business outcomes from a more mobile, social, and virtual workforce.” I had a chance to speak one on one with Leslie Owens. She spoke at this event the next day and here are my session notes (Forrester's Leslie Owens on Harnessing the Voice of the Employee). (Leslie’s expertise includes: enterprise search, semantic tools, information classification, and taxonomies and I have covered her work before (see for example, Forrester on Enterprise Search Trends).
We first discussed looking into the voice of the employee, the topic covered in her talk and recorded in my session notes above. I will not repeat the parts she covered in her talk. Leslie noted in our conversation that the enterprise is a bounded community. You know all about the participants who engage in conversations within the enterprise social media platforms. You know much more about them than the customers or prospects who participate in social media on the Web. I think that many of the applications of social media such as wikis and activity streams can have even greater value within trusted communities within the enterprise. In this case I am not suggesting that listening to the voice of the employee is of higher value than the listening to the voice of the customer. They complement each other. On some issues employee conversations may help better explain what is being discussed by customers and visa versa.
We also discussed the privacy issue a bit more. People objected to data mining emails because the expectation was that they are private. Personally, I think this is mistaken assumption. They are certainly discoverable in a legal action. It is my understanding that most company email systems indicate that they can be monitored for inappropriate actions. However, emails are not immediately transparent to everyone so there is some expectation for privacy.
With social computing inside the enterprise the expectation is transparency. It is actually seen as one of the benefits. So looking at the voice of employee with better analytic tools is simply doing a better job of maximizing this opportunity and increasing the return on investment in social tools. It is doing what they are designed to do. People still need a secure place to communicate but permission levels can be established. There are also other channels outside social media. Privacy is important and there is too much invasion of it today but enterprise social media is the place for transparency within a trusted group, either the whole enterprise or a subgroup within in it.
We also briefly touched on some of the current trends in enterprise search. Call center support is one area of innovation. Custom searches for call center agents bring in relevant content from diverse sources. This is a much-needed improvement. I have done a lot of work with knowledge support for call centers. One agent in the UK said to me that one of the most important skills was the ability to engage the caller in amusing chat will you frantically searched through multiple databases for the answers to their questions.
This unified search is also extended to customer facing web sites (see for example; Coveo Customer Information Access Solutions (CIAS) Moves to Version 2.0). Here is an excellent report that Leslie and her colleagues did, Site Search Evolves from Technical Feature to Customer Touchpoint, and here is my commentary on the report - Evolution of Site Search.
There is also much work being done in federated search going across structured and unstructured data. Here is a conversation I had with Sid Probstein, CTO at Attivio, a firm focused on this issue. I started by asking Sid about the opportunity within enterprise 2.0 to take advantage of looking at the unstructured data to determine the pulse of the enterprise. Sid responded and also showed me a demo of how Attivio can pull unstructured content from product review sites on the Web and index it along with structured data from a CRM system. Here is an earlier review of their work (Attivio Tightly Integrates Structured Data and Unstructured Content for a New Approach to Information Access).
Leslie added that enterprise search is behind Web search on a number of issues beyond the voice of the customer/employee issue. Personalization and making effective use of past search behavior are areas where enterprise needs to catch up. There are great opportunities to provide more individual relevance within the enterprise. The rise of enterprise social media should help accommodate this need by providing more context to aid search engines, just as it is doing on the Web.
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