Social Computing for the High Tech and Manufacturing Industries
Common Challenges in High Tech & Manufacturing
As the pace of innovation continues to accelerate, High Tech companies increasingly need to retain and attract talent, and the highly paid knowledge workers they hire have to be able to collaborate and discover expertise and information more efficiently.
Recruiting, Retaining, Retiring
Finding and keeping quality hires, capturing retiring employees’ expertise, and adapting to the expectations and values of Generation Y are not part of regular business systems.
Expertise Location
Employees spend valuable time trying to find the right expert in the company.
Information Overload and Lack of Collaboration Tools
Demand for innovation is growing, and employees spend too much time looking for information they need to do their jobs and can’t make use of it when they do.
Widely Distributed Workforce
Difficult to facilitate communication among employees that span different locations, time zones, mobile devices and operating systems.
The Benefits of Social Computing for High Tech Companies
Generally speaking, social computing offers the greatest impact for organizations that have large groups of knowledge workers that require large amounts of information to do their jobs. NewsGator's social computing business solutions provide an integrated, behind-the-firewall social computing platform that supports knowledge capture, information discovery, and knowledge worker collaboration.
These solutions have helped our High Tech customers realize benefits such as:
- Increased innovation
- Shorter product lifecycles
- Enhanced competitive position
- Higher revenues
- Easier to recruit and retain employees
- Lower IT investment and support costs
- Improved productivity
Sample Social Computing Use Cases for High Tech & Manufacturing Companies
A wide range of use cases are possible with NewsGator’s social computing and collaboration solutions. A few examples of the collaboration and enterprise features we have implemented for the High Tech industry include:
Expert Locator
With Social Sites® profile pages and tacit behavior data collection, employees can easily locate colleagues and identify experts by their portal actions.
Community Builder
Using Social Sites Communities, employees can form online groups around new product development, customer service issues or common interests in order to share information and documents, engage in rich discussions, and discover subject matter experts – resulting in improved collaboration, shorter product life cycles, and better customer service.
Social Computing Platform
Younger workers are accustomed to using consumer-based social computing tools. With Social Sites, High Tech companies can offer similar tools designed specifically for business purposes. Providing tools in an environment that matches workers’ experiences can be an important way to recruit and retain employees and helps ensure that business processes happen through the company's business systems instead of an external web source.
Brand/Competitor Tracker
With the Enterprise RSS capabilities in Social Sites™, management can subscribe employees to aggregated, relevant, and timely news about the company, its competitors and the industry. Information can be delivered to multiple devices/locations including SharePoint, mobile, web, and desktop – ensuring that knowledge workers have the most up-to-date information for their jobs.