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Comment by douche | Hacker News Reader

I've also never really figured out what value Yammer, and other similar products, like Chatter from SalesForce, or IBM's Lotus Connections, was supposed to provide. As best I can tell, the rationale must have been something like:

1.) Well, our employees spend a lot of time screwing around on Facebook, so let's build something that looks almost identical, but that is supposed to be used for posting status messages about work, instead of BuzzFeed listicles, baby pictures, and venting!

2.) ?????

3.) PROFIT!!!!

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Having been on the inside implementing some of these systems the main driver is consistently desperation to 'engage' the workforce by trying to create in-work communities.

Employee engagement is a key metric for a productive workforce but the studies that I saw all showed it declining over the past decade. Along come the 'social platform' salesmen and cleverly pitch at Business clients, who then tell Technology that they've found a solution to engagement if we'd just hurry-up and deploy $PLATFORM.

The enthusiasm usually lasts until the end of the initial support period, three years say, and then another $PLATFORM arrives which will definitely solve the problem.

Providing a social platform is fine but the employees need to have meaningful, empowered work before they'll even be motivated to look at it. In the absence of that, coercion reached the stage where employees were being forced to create their profiles on the new platform as part of annual goals.

So many profiles created and avatars loaded, never to be used...

These kinds of things are very helpful in allowing employees to solve problems and share the solutions among themselves in large traditional organizations instead of always needing a top down solution.

The article talks about the guy that posted the fix to reading old email by copying an encryption key. It's discussed in a light as if he were doing something wrong but in reality he was probably solving an actual problem people have. In the process, it sounds like he also exposed the fact that you can copy keys our of what sounds like should have been a read only smart card but that points to the VA IT department being inept not that guy doing anything wrong. The fact that employees use yammer to begin with probably is because the IT department is inept and doesn't provide a good sanctioned forum for communication.

It's actually incredibly important for our sales team. They use it to ask questions of product & marketing, share information about our products with each other, track new launches, etc.. This is hard in a distributed workspace and a company with many hundreds of people.

How else would you expect it to work? Email doesn't cut it (point to point, not searchable, low signal:noise) and I haven't seen a high functioning wiki, which seems like the closest alternative.

For sales in particular, though, I think the integration with SFDC (in Chatter's case) is pretty key. They live on Salesforce, so the messages & communication is right there and can easily be linked back to specific accounts as necessary.

Social network tools were found as very productive (since ppl are familiar with them from home). This caused employees to form work groups on commercial products like Facebook, WhatsApp, etc... companies want to give employees those same tools but under the control of the company and with enhanced governance.

Having seen a lot of the content that goes through these products, from the compliance side, I'm not sure that they are particularly "productive." Where they have any uptake at all (surprisingly rare, for such expensive products, that require so much work to implement and roll out), it's pretty... meh.

It seems like "social" is a buzzword that is finally starting to lose it's luster, but it was pretty ridiculous for a while - IBM changing the name of Lotusphere to IBM Connections, all of these business Facebook-clones, Microsoft spending a boat-load of money on Yammer, then letting it languish, while building more or less parallel features into SharePoint and Office365.

So much hype about "transforming the way people work" and some truly disturbing rhetoric about enabling the blurring of personal and work life. Good riddance.

People know how to work. Work gets done despite the lack of these "enabling" social tools, or even despite their presence.

People like to play around with how to arrange metawork. Mangers especially like this. A lot of it is yak shaving.

The level of productivity in so many megacorporations is so low it's just plain alarming. I've commented before at work that if this is all I was able to do in the time I've had at most smaller companies we'd either have gone bankrupt or I'd have been fired. When something as simple and necessary to do your job as "I need access to a gig repo to fix a defect, here's the patch" takes weeks or months, you may get some work done but the rate of actual accomplishments would become basically negative.

Enabling users to get something done while adhering to corporate policies effectively is a problem I don't believe anyone has solved for the Fortune 500 as a whole. If they did, I assure you that several billion of a market cap would be a small fraction of their likely valuation. Slack isn't allowed in most places in the F500 as shadow IT goes, for example, but they hit the billion dollar club within months practically because they approached chat in a small manner that Salesforce did. Even a small, tiny win is a billion dollars across these kinds of companies.

> Enabling users to get something done while adhering to corporate policies effectively is a problem I don't believe anyone has solved for the Fortune 500 as a whole.

Well, they must have figured out how to get something done, to have survived long enough to get into the Fortune 500. :)

Most big companies primarily grow through acquisitions and just gluing together innovative efforts and hoping that results in sufficient value after the attrition common after companies are acquired. If big companies could grow like start-ups often, we'd have a very different business climate.

It's why big companies are more concerned about losing revenue than growing it - this is the opposite with start-ups. It's what seems obvious when you're near your market cap.

People know how to work. Work gets done despite the lack of these "enabling" social tools, or even despite their presence.

Of course it does. But does it get done as well, or as effectively, or as efficiently without a certain level of technological support? Would you want to work in a company that didn't use any technological capabilities for collaboration? No email, no IM, no document sharing of any sort, etc? I mean, printing out documents and sending them via one of those old-style interoffice memo envelopes ought to be enough for anybody, right?

The thing is, not every company needs the same kind of technological capabilities, because they don't all have the same issues. If you're in a 10 person startup where everybody sits in one room, a lot of knowledge sharing is done by just speaking out loud and everybody hears you. If you're in a 32,000 person company with offices spread around 80 countries, it's a lot harder to make sure that everybody knows everything they need to know, and knows it in a timely manner. And there are "serendipitous communications" that will never happen without some technological help, as you have employees who will almost certainly never meet in person. Or if they do, it'll be once every couple of years.

Tooling can be beneficial, it's just important to understand that no tool is a panacea. Also, no tool(s) can fix a toxic company culture, or broken processes. These are reasons some companies deploy technological tools to enhance collaboration and knowledge sharing, and don't see the expected benefits.

(Disclaimer: I'm totally biased, as my company makes "enterprise social software". Take everything I say with a grain of salt as you see fit.)

My feeling is that a lot of this is because people thought "Hey, we can make a private Facebook clone and drop it inside our organization and people will use it to be more productive". I think that's a mistaken approach. "Social" tools certainly can have value in an organisation, but there's nothing magic about a Facebook clone (or web-based IRC for that matter).

Our position at Fogbeam is that ESN's (Enterprise Social Network), in order to provide real value, have to do more. That is, they have to connect with the things and ways that people actually get work done, and make it easier to find (information|people|documents|whatever) that you need to do something... in addition to the fluffier "idle chit chat" aspects. If an ESN can do that, then it can provide value.

Of course, I'm biased, as that's one of the ways in which our ESN approach differs from some of the others. We have a tremendous focus on integration with other enterprise applications. And we use semantic web technology to do automatic semantic entity extraction from the text flowing around the system, so we can build a knowledge-base that helps people find related information.

I'll be the first to say that a lot of companies have not received as much value from deploying internal social software as they might have expected. We just think it's (in part) because they used first generation social software that doesn't provided the needed capabilities.

Another reason that companies fail to get a lot of value from this stuff is much harder to resolve: company culture and values. Simply put, some organisations will NEVER get much value from social software because the internal culture discourages collaboration, and encourages knowledge-hoarding, competition, backstabbing, secrecy and what-not. If Joe Manager at one of those firms puts in Yammer, or Jive, or Lotus Connections, or Fogcutter, or anything else, it's going to fail. In those cases, it has little or nothing to do with the technology.

(Disclaimer: I'm totally biased, as my company makes "enterprise social software". Take everything I say with a grain of salt as you see fit.)

I think it's more like: 1) communication is one of the most important things our employees do, 2) let's use communication tools that our employees might like.

It's just the current equivalent of internal newsgroups.

An old Yammer thread can be archived and searchable for other users.

Working in a large, dated codebase, I would love to be able to see previous discussions about features, pieces of code, code reviews, etc. But because they occurred over email, they undiscoverable to me.

they were trying to do what Slack is succeeding at. HipChat as a trailing entity.

Chatter was free, standalone, came actually close to what Slack does. But it wasn't hip enough to start in the early adopter circles, they went straight into enterprise with it, which is how you kill anything innovative. fist you get the hipsters, THEN you go after the suits. other way round kills your product due to wrong feedback.

This is pretty much what Google+ For Corporations is.

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