Social Computing for the High Tech Industry

Common Challenges in the High Tech Industry

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 Workforces

  Difficult to facilitate communication among employees that span different locations, time zones, mobile devices and operating systems.

The Benefits of Social Computing

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 Enterprise RSS and Social Networking 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 Companies

A wide range of solutions are possible with NewsGator’s enterprise RSS and social networking products. A few examples of the 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.