What's All the Chatter About?

Regardless of how you feel about Twitter, Yammer, and other micro-blogging services that are cropping up, they’re here to stay. The question is: how will these services to evolve to meet the needs of the social enterprise? Michael Krigsman of ZDNet writes about the launch of Salesforce Chatter and points out a few of the obstacles their larger customers will likely encounter:

Although Salesforce.com understands these new approaches, the enterprise does not yet recognize collaboration and Enterprise 2.0 as a mission critical activity. Market education that demonstrates concrete value is key to solving this particular challenge.

There’s a good reason why many CIO’s don’t perceive “chatter” to be mission critical: because it’s not.

At least, it’s hardly critical when it’s disconnected from core business initiatives. Providing individual workers with the ability to post status updates is a great way to foster collaboration and a sense of team. However, it also presents the risk of adding more noise and even more opportunities to be randomized. For chatter to be useful, it should be contextual and integrated.

Which is why we think it’s most powerful when chatter is directly integrated within a project plan. It serves both as a telescope and a microscope. From a macro perspective, chatter provides a steady stream of information that is (mostly) relevant.

Workspace Chatter on the Dashboard in LiquidPlanner

This is the situational awareness that provides frontline workers with greater context than what is usually found at the task level. At a micro level, the ability to automatically attach chatter to tasks within a plan helps to create a living project plan, where important commentary can exist outside the vacuum of email. Which is how chatter can in fact become mission critical to every enterprise. 

Workspace Chatter as Viewed on a Single Project's Collaboration Page in LiquidPlanne

Has Workplace Chatter improved your project planning? Tell us how in the comments.

Comments

[Riel]

I love it that I'm guaranteed that every chat in LiquidPlanner has some value because it's connected to some task or project we are working on.

I'm super chatty and like to comment on everything I do. This also provides a trail of what I've done.

So that I don't disturb my developer with so much chatter I always use "direct engagement" chatter (using @chris) for things I want him to read.

[Crystal McKenzie]

I'm sure workplace chatter is even more useful in places with more than one collaborator, but I work alone and find it useful even just to chatter to myself. I remind myself of what I worked on, what I tried that didn't work, what I was thinking when I was working... all kinds of things that help keep different days of work connected to each other. There are enough places to comment within LiquidPlanner that I find myself doing it all the time, especially when a thought of mine starts with the expression, "Hmm..." :)

I bet that if someone is on a team who isn't chattering much, and tries chattering just for little procedural comments like this, it will probably catch on. :)