Expanding Your Reach: Social Enterprise, Collaboration, Awareness and Integration
Jinfo Blog

By Christy Confetti-Higgins

Abstract

Communications for information professionals in the enterprise is critical, as it creates awareness of the information services being provided to the company and how those services impact the business.

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Communications for information professionals in the enterprise is critical, as it creates awareness of the information services being provided to the company and how those services impact the business. However, communications these days goes well beyond sending email newsletters or putting up posters. Communications today are more about engaging employees around information, collaborating, and integrating yourself and information into communities and social enterprise platforms in order to expand awareness and value to your organisation.

Effective communications also provide us with opportunities for integrating information into the business, and creating relationships with employees globally. Using social enterprise tools (such as Yammer), acting on collaboration opportunities, and driving more widespread awareness and understanding of the value of information helps us to also create new stakeholders across the organisation.

Within this collection of articles on Internal Communications over the past six months, I see several key trends related to communications that provide amazing opportunities for information services in the enterprise. Some of the trends include:

• Expanding social enterprise tools for collaboration and communications
• Integrating information and communications into internal products
• Expanding the role of the Intranet
• Collaborations' increasing role in innovation
• Reaching global teams across various time zones and regions to drive awareness, collaboration and communication of information services
• Increasing the accessibility of information via mobile devices, and leveraging mobile delivery for connecting with employees
• Establishing communications strategies based on the message, and choosing the right channel for a given communication
• Leveraging new tools for information sharing and engaging employees

The benefits of communication, collaboration and awareness not only increase information sharing, connections, information integration and visibility to stakeholders. According to an analysis of 4,200 companies by the McKinsey Global Institute, social tools have the potential to unlock from $900 billion to $1.3 trillion in value. The trends we are seeing around social enterprise tools and collaboration platforms are impacting the bottom line in organisations in new ways. The analysis indicates that organisations are embracing social tools - including internal networks, wikis, and real-time chat - for purposes far beyond just marketing and community building. For information professionals, these tools can provide a very important channel for engaging employees with information services, and an effective means for information sharing and communication internally.

I hope you enjoy this collection of articles on Internal Communications as much as I have. Reading through the examples of communication topics that span intranets, gamification, social enterprise tools, collaboration tools, awareness efforts, stakeholder strategies and more, highlights the opportunities for us to increase our value to our organisations, which is excellent!

The statements and opinions expressed here are my own and do not necessarily represent those of Oracle Corporation.

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