When Salesforce introduced the Chatter platform in 2010, it was billed as “Facebook for Enterprise”. They weren’t kidding. Chatter has all the trappings of a social media network without all the distracting parts—namely, people outside of what you’re doing.
Because of this, Chatter has all the journal and sharing functions of a social network while making sure that features are there to make sure employees can accurately track what’s going on with their colleagues. The result, for IT groups, is better overall communication and collaborative project management.
The Many Collaborative Functions of Chatter
Chatter is a collaborative platform, but it doesn’t work the same way as, say, Google Documents. Why? Because while Docs is primarily document and object focused, Chatter is human-centric: it focuses on everything you’re doing as opposed to specific projects. This is valuable because it helps to establish collaborative priorities, making the group more effective overall than before.
An example can easily be demonstrated by looking at Chatter’s feed option, which allows users to track their colleague’s updates. Thus, rather than waiting for specific projects to be done, Chatter can help the group prioritize which jobs need immediate work and move towards other projects later. It’s an ingenious way of using the power of the crowd to help focus on those projects which have immediate priority.
Another advantage of Chatter is that it allows you to determine groups within your hierarchy, which make sure that you aren’t wasting time on things that are not the primary focus of the team.
Improving Internal Communications Within IT
By using Chatter, IT projects can get done more quickly and effectively than they were able to before. How? Because communication is more direct in Chatter, similar to what is used in Facebook and other messaging platforms. By allowing the flexibility that is inherent in social media to help users reach out to each other when needed, projects can reach their potential far more easily than traditional e-mail or other methods.
In the end, Chatter is a social client for enterprise—precisely what was promised. The real value in this is the fact that social functions are part of the everyday life of the modern enterprise. Chatter takes what makes those communications effective and moves that effectiveness into the professional sphere.
With its arsenal of social tools, feed collection and collaborative function, Chatter brings social into the IT department more effectively than ever before. If you aren’t already taking advantage of Chatter through your SharePoint implementation, you should strongly consider it.