Embedding Collaborative Thinking in Everyday Processes
Jinfo Blog

By Shimrit Janes

Abstract

The FreePint Topic Series: The Social Enterprise now moves its focus to gamification in the enterprise, embedding "social" in the process, and how to use SharePoint 2013 more effectively. Shimrit Janes highlights recent and upcoming content in the series.

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We are now into the final weeks of our FreePint Topic Series: The Social Enterprise. We've had some fantastic articles from our contributors so far, covering essential topics such as:

• What you need to do make "social" succeed in your organisation
• Mobilising advocates
• Storytelling
• Future trends in intranets
• Some of the vagaries of public social media channels.

We're also exploring SharePoint, gamification, and an emerging trend: how can "social" be applied to different business processes.

Embedding "Social" in Process

One of the difficulties many organisations face is how to embed the use of social tools into their business processes. A myth that we've tried to address through this series has been the idea that you can simply "switch on" social tools, instead focusing on the importance of deploying within your business rather than against your business.

In our upcoming Q&A with Fuse CEO Steve Dineen, we explore how user-generated videos and social thinking can be applied to organisations' development programmes, and act as a bridge between offline and online social learning. This is a key lesson that Steve shares: that it doesn't need to be "either/or", but rather that social tools can be used to enhance in-person experiences, and vice versa.

Founder of startup TallyFy, Amit Kothari, looks at how social tools can be embedded in clearly defined business processes, to deliver tangible benefits for organisations and avoid the "hype" of social.

Away from the unstructured world of ad hoc knowledge sharing so often associated with tools such as blogs and wikis, Amit puts forward a clear case for the application of collaborative thinking to the more structured world of everyday, essential processes that many of us follow.

SharePoint

Following our popular articles on alternatives to SharePoint and whether or not your organisation should deploy SharePoint, this week we turn to exploring how you can use SharePoint more effectively.

Sarah Dillingham will be taking a look at SharePoint 2013, and how you can use its social elements more effectively.

Do You Play?

Gamification. We've all heard of it. We all know roughly what it entails. But do we know whether it's right for our organisation?

Steve Bynghall, who also brought us articles on making social succeed in the first week of this series, explored precisely that in his two recent pieces.

Beyond the odd badge against a social profile, can this trend of applying "games thinking" within the organisation truly have an impact? Can every organisation benefit? Or are there some for whom gamification is best left to those with cultures of a better fit?

Steve helps us unpick some of these questions.

Editor's Note: The Social Enterprise

The FreePint Topic Series: The Social Enterprise runs from January to March 2014 to examine the ways that organisations are maximising internal social connections and knowledge management.

Register your interest now for notification of new content published in the series, to get early announcements to register for FreePint Webinars produced in the series, and to receive a free copy of the FreePint Report: Buyer's Guide on Social Tools, scheduled for publication in March.

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