If your current productivity software was a candidate applying for a job, I'd imagine you'd describe the applicant as frustrating, time-consuming, rigid, antisocial, and maybe "old-school." Definitely, too expensive for what they're really doing. Not exactly a flock of adjectives that would indicate a good fit.
Shouldn't we apply most of the same criteria for hiring employees that we use for productivity software? Certainly, productivity software's job expectations have changed so it's at least time for a new job description. Personality-wise, I might look for a candidate that's easy to work with, social, quick, and can jump into any situation and help. Not to mention energetic and (dare I say) fun to work with.
One prospective customer of ours is a 15,000 employee health care company. They're making their decision about which software to choose by putting different choices in front of a lot of different cross-functional employees and scoring based on a number of use criteria--including how easy the software is to use and how much the employees liked to use it. The IT department stripped several applications of their branding so they could perform this as a "blind taste test." Since everyone was going to use the software daily, they saw this process as critical. They also strongly felt like the software's values needed to reflect their culture, since culture was a key ingredient to this company's success.
Ultimately, it's time for a whole new set of productivity metrics as we move from personal productivity to social productivity. Isn't it time to take a good, hard look at your existing "productivity software" and think about having an intervention?
Comments
This post has 2 comments. We encourage you to please post your own!
Kim Feraday
Oct 28, 2007 at 7:58:57 PM
One of the real challenges I’ve found with social networking is that, in some ways, it’s very antisocial. That is, it can be very difficult to find people who I might want to collaborate with to explore an idea, develop a product, complete a project, etc. And once I’ve found them, it’s not particularly easy to effectively evaluate whether I’d really want to collaborate with them. I think a lot more could be done in the areas of search and visualization to help solve some of these antisocial traits. I also think that going beyond simple profiling would help as well -- a service that would give me a person’s “credentials”, (their work experience, education, interests, reputation and other criteria) would go along way to helping me build a productive community. Have any of these criteria shown up in any of your customers’ productivity metrics?
Sam
Oct 30, 2007 at 9:44:17 PM
Hi Kim,
You bring up an important point, especially as people engage member-to-member within online communities or as you, as an employee, look beyond the internal collaboration within company and into your supplier, partner and/or customer networks for help. We happen to agree fully about providing richer profile information to help answer "creditials." It will be a critical part of social productivity and it's interesting to think about credible connections as a productivity metric, too.
Thanks for your comment!