S.E.T. as one seamlessly connected platform
The other day, a professional acquaintance was sharing his experience about submitting an online form. The webpage apparently refused to move ahead citing errors in their submission. What exactly his omissions were, and how he was to rectify them was hardly actionable. He ventured to seek fellow workers’ (with prior, relevant experience) help in addressing the situation, but it took him several email iterations and physical interactions to identify someone who could assist.
As luck would have it, this person had only vague recollection of how a turnaround was earlier found since another associate, no longer with company, dealt with it. The key data was buried deep inside their enterprise chat solution. Some manual search later the relevant conversation was finally retrieved, getting them back to where it all started: the online form. The saga didn’t end here, for they were compelled to engage a consultant to sail past these challenges.
The experience forced me to have a fresh look at what we aim to achieve through Social Enterprise Technology (S.E.T.), world’s first enterprise platform to deliver what we call Conversational Applications. It guided me to a rediscovery of what S.E.T. is essentially about and better articulate what we are doing.
Not just data-access, but data-linkage
Some enterprise tools in the market like to boast their ability to access data buried deep inside in a span of seconds (or even less). But data discovery is only half the battle; the other half is about the thread of associated elements such as documents, emails, chats, or any other form of business conversations. Had such a linkage been activated in the above-mentioned scenario, all my friend had to do was to dive straight into the business conversation about the topic and benefit from the mutually-derived wisdom of two business-users long ago.
Data-linkage is vital because no entity is an island, it exists as an integral part of an ecosystem. Use of several tools scatters the data and piecing them together is a puzzle in itself.
We need a solution that links data, documents, conversations and analytics. To a user, these elements must appear as one seamless connection. Data must be simultaneously accessible and tagged to the documents and conversations, and analytics engine must be readily invokable at any stage of interaction for instant insights.
The blandly-worded error-messages in the online form webpage left my friend no wiser than what he previously was. The phrasing part is a minor issue, the real issue is lack of relevant intelligence and inability to benefit from past interactions. This calls for a solution that learns from these interactions and provision itself with proactive intelligence, the user will be hugely relieved from repetitive errors in submission.
We’ve earlier discussed about ‘socializing’ data, and this linkage of data, documents, conversations and analytics is what enables this process. Therefore, data itself tells the story; data itself becomes collaborative.
The interconnectedness of enterprise elements, be it men or machines, barely makes its way into the design philosophy of many enterprise collaboration tools. S.E.T. not just is cognizant about the interconnectedness but has made this central to its functioning. The seamless linkage at once makes S.E.T. an enterprise-universal platform, wherein every element is accessed, consumed and leveraged from within the framework.
As to my friend, I had the opportunity to take him through the essentials of S.E.T. and he appeared excited about the possibilities that the approach can throw open.