Social Computing for the Professional Services Industry

Common Challenges in the Professional Services Industry

The Professional Services Industry faces challenges in finding new business opportunities, retaining skilled employees and improving productivity and services.

• Widely Distributed Workforces

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

• 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.

The Benefits of Social Computing

NewsGator's Enterprise RSS and Social Networking solutions provide an integrated, behind-the-firewall social computing platform that supports collaboration, facilitates communication and improves worker knowledge. These solutions have helped customers realize benefits like:

• Higher revenues
• More efficient communication
• Easier to recruit and retain employees
• Lower IT investment and support costs
• Improved productivity
• Better customer service/satisfaction

Sample Social Computing Use Cases for Professional Services 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 Professional Services 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 a client project, issue or common interest in order to share information and documents, engage in rich discussions, and discover subject matter experts – resulting in improved collaboration and the ability to create solutions more quickly.

• Information Aggregation Service

  With NewsGator Enterprise Server, management can subscribe employees to aggregated, relevant, and timely news and information that is delivered to the device/location of choice, including SharePoint, mobile, web, and desktop.

• Wiki-Based Policy and Procedure Documents

  Policy and procedure documents built with wikis and NewsGator RSS feeds allows employees to always be notified of new content and ensure employees have up-to-date information without using email – leading to a more informed workforce and lowering the risks of non-compliance with corporate policies.