the emerging role of social employee apps

7/28/2019 The Emerging Role of Social Employee Apps

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A White Paper for

Corporate Decision-Makers

The Emerging Role ofSocial Employee Apps

An Independent Analysis Published on Behalf of salesforce.com.


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Executive Overview

IT departments are struggling to adapt to new economic realities and a rapidly changingtechnology environment that includes fundamental shifts in mobile, social, and cloudcomputing technologies.

The lingering effects of the downturn marked by flat-to-negative IT budgets are forcing ITdepartments to reassess and more accurately measure the real business value delivered byboth existing and future IT investments. No system or project is out of scope as IT looks forany opportunity to squeeze additional productivity from an aging portfolio and map it to amore demanding and collaborative business environment. Organizations are rethinkingtraditional development platforms and architectural models in favor of solutions that offerspeed, economy, and agility.

At issue is how to support this new world defined by agile processes and mobile workforceswithout the expense of replacing or expanding the current systems infrastructure. Instead ofreplacing core operational systems, many IT departments are defining and creating a newapplications layer based on the UI and collaborative concepts learned from modern socialnetworking websites such as Facebook and Twitter. This layer is made up of lightweight,

collaborative applications and services built with less-expensive platforms that create a layerof agility around core operational systems. It allows a much higher number of business usersto access and collaborate around core operational data using the new wave of mobiledevices, including smart phones and tablets. In many cases, these applications are built bythe actual business users and governed centrally by IT.

This new layer of enterprise employee solutions is increasingly being referred to as socialemployee applications.

This white paper will examine how social employee apps differ from traditional enterprisesoftware and complement and extend the functional capabilities of legacy environments.

The Modern Enterprise Portfolio Dilemma

Many organizations have spent years and millions of dollars designing and deploying coreoperating systems such as their financial or enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications.Ironically, only a fraction of a companys processes are automated and aligned with theseenterprise systems in most cases. The majority of a companys processes are manual anddisconnected from the core systems. These processes are often siloed within disparatedepartments, geographies, and groups within a company and cant be cost-effectivelysupported with traditional IT programs.

Top Five Enterprise Application Implementation Pain Points

A 2005 AMR Research study found organizations implementing on-premises enterpriseapps such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions were

1:

1.Slow to embrace change: 53% of implementing organizations assess theirability to deal with change as fairly poor or very poor.

2.Underestimating the cost: 71% of ERP projects cost more than their estimatedbudgets.

3.Not seeing expected benefits: 41% fail to realize at least half of the businessbenefits they expected from their ERP systems.

4.Unable to pinpoint any benefits: 22% of implementations fail to deliver at leastsome measurable business benefits from their ERP solutions.

1The Enterprise Planning Spending Report 2005-2006, AMR Research


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The Emerging Role of Social Employee Apps

THINKstrategies, Inc., 2011 www.thinkstrategies.com p.3

5.Unprepared to handle the consequences: 40% of the companies surveyedrealized major operational disruptions after implementation go-live, such as theinability to ship products or to close the books.

The same study found that only 15% of employees are licensed to use their companysERP system, and 46% of licensed ERP seats go unused.

As a result of these issues, only 68% of executives and 61% of employees are at leastsomewhat satisfied with their ERP solutions.

Defining the New Generation of Social Employee Apps

Social employee apps are the latest generation of business apps that companies aredeploying to drive innovation and efficiency across the organization. Rather than continue torely on highly centralized but resource-intensive systems, smart organizations are nowdiversifying their IT portfolios to include new types of business applications.

These IT departments are taking advantage of powerful new development tools and deliveryservices to create and distribute business apps that provide a new layer of agility around theoperational core. These new applications are built by both the IT department and thebusiness. They are used to expose key operational data from the core and extend it in highlyusable formats to a greater number of employees than previously possible.

Figure 1:Social employee apps create a layer of agility around a stable operational core.

Five Key Characteristics of Social Employee Apps

1. Rapid time to value Can be built in days by non-technical staff, with minimaloperating costs.

2. High user adoption and colloboration Require minimal to no end-user training.

3. Elasticity Automatically and instantly scale across any number of users.

4. Mobile access Accessible on any device: laptop, mobile, smart phone, etc.

5. Ease of integration Use open and proven enterprise APIs to seamlessly integratewith core systems.


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Unlocking the Full Potential of Your Core Operational Systems

Companies are using a new generation of powerful Web-based development tools anddelivery capabilities to augment and enhance the capabilities of their back-office systems,such as their ERP systems.

This new cloud-based layer of social employee apps allows organizations to quickly extendkey core functionality to a much larger percentage of their operations and out to theirbusiness end users, customers, and strategic partners.

Social employee apps are built to be more mobile, collaborative, and easier to use thanother applications because their intuitive user interface emulates popular social media likeFacebook and Twitter and requires minimal user training.

As a result, the new generation of social employee apps offers the following businessadvantages:

Speed and collaboration Adding cloud capabilities to core applicationsimmediately adds new business value to your legacy investments.

Innovation and economy Creating new functional capabilities is not only easier,

but takes fewer resources and costs less than using legacy software.

A redefined user experience Today, business applications that run on anydevice, including tablets like iPads and smart phones, should use new UIframeworks made popular by social networking services such as Facebook andTwitter.

Ease of integration Extending the data trapped in back-office systems to keydepartments and end users makes your organization more efficient and agile.

Centralized governance Building in log management and tracking capabilitiesensures that management and systems administrators can manage thedevelopment and rollout of new social employee apps to ensure their compliance.

Figure 2:

Social Employee Apps Provide New Capabilities to More UsersWith Minimal Resources


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Choosing the Right Development Platform

Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) platforms are a natural fit for this new generation of socialemployee apps. PaaS platforms provide the three characteristics developers look for whenbuilding social employee applications:

1. Speed of development

2. Centralized governance

3. Open integration

Speed of Development

PaaS platforms have proved to be fast both for initial development and for the ability tomodify or customize applications. The integrated development environments of modernPaaS platforms eliminate the need to build low-level services such as reporting, security,APIs, and UI forms, allowing developers to immediately build processes into businessapplications.

According to Nucleus Research, accelerating the development and deployment process isthe first attraction of todays cloud-based platforms:

On average, developers found that they could deliver applications 4.9 timesfaster in the cloud than on Java or .NET.

IDC also found that PaaS platforms permitted organizations to easily create new applicationsusing:

85% fewer developer hours and at a 54% lower cost compared to traditional in-house development tools and techniques.

Dick Escue, CIO of RehabCare, confirmed this finding:

Were blown away by how we built a healthcare app in the cloud with oneperson in just 4 days. The same app built in .NET would have taken over 3months.

Centralized Governance

Perhaps most interesting is the centralized deployment model of cloud computing platforms.PaaS solutions often provide shared security and data models that give IT departments anadditional layer of governance and control.

The centralized model makes it feasible for companies to create centers of excellence thatsupport a federated development program without losing control over the applications thatare built and deployed across the business.

Ease of administration is one of the top reasons executives select PaaS platforms..PaaSeliminates the infrastructure, operations, and workflow management and reportingrequirements inherent in legacy systems. Instead, according to Doug Menefee, CIO ofSchumacher Group:

We found in building applications on top of a PaaS platform, I only need oneadministrator for every four administrators that I would have needed for an on-premises solution.

Open Integration

Lastly, PaaS APIs have proven effective for rapid integration with core operational systems.Most PaaS platforms now provide platform-based, upgradable SOAP, ATOM, and RESTAPIs that are managed and supported by the vendor. This setup provides a more stableSOA endpoint for synchronizing data or messaging with on-premises systems.

In fact, salesforce.coms Force.com cloud platform currently supports more than 400 millionintegration transactions per day.


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Conclusion

A confluence of escalating business challenges is driving organizations of all sizes acrossnearly every industry to re-think how they develop and deliver end-user applications.

Rather than rely on traditional systems and legacy software to meet the needs of an

increasingly mobile and collaborative workforce, innovative organizations are leveraging anew generation of Web-/cloud-based development platforms, such as salesforce.comsForce.com, to quickly build social employee apps that can be accessed from anywhere viaany mobile device.

These cloud-based development platforms, combined with social networking tools likeSalesforce Chatter, encourage the rapid adoption of user-friendly applications. This evolutiongives IT departments a new development alternative to quickly develop, adopt, and iteratethese new apps to manage their changing day-to-day responsibilities and achieve theiroverall objectives.

Rather than compete with installed enterprise systems, social employee apps enhance andextend their capabilities, enabling organizations to increase their productivity and maximizetheir return on investment (ROI) on their existing application portfolio.


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This independent analysis was sponsored by salesforce.com.

About salesforce.com

Salesforce.com is the enterprise cloud computing company that has transformed the way companiescollaborate and communicate. Salesforce.com is leading the effort to accelerate the enterprise shift to thenext generation of cloud computing by offering its customers the social collaboration, mobility, and opennessthat are the hallmark of this new world. As of April 30, 2011, salesforce.com manages customer informationfor 97,700 customers.

The companys platform and application services include: Salesforce Chatter, a private social network for your enterprise The Sales Cloud, for sales force automation and contact management The Service Cloud, for customer service and support solutions Radian6, for social media monitoring and engagement The Jigsaw Data Cloud, for ensuring data integrity and quality The Force.com platform, for custom application development Heroku, for building social and mobile apps in Ruby The AppExchange, the worlds leading marketplace for enterprise cloud computing applications

For more information please visit www.salesforce.com, or call 1-800-NO-SOFTWARE.

About THINKstrategies, Inc.

THINKstrategies is a strategic consulting services company formed specifically to address the

unprecedented business challenges facing IT managers, solutions providers, and investors today as thetechnology industry shifts toward a services orientation. The companys mission is to help our clients re-THINK their corporate strategies, and refocus their limited resources to achieve their business objectives.THINKstrategies has also founded the Cloud Computing Showplace (www.cloudshowplace.com), an easy-to-use, online directory and resource center of SaaS, PaaS and IaaS solutions worldwide, organized intoover 90 Application, Industry, Service and Enabling Technology categories. The Showplace also includesinformation and insights regarding industry best practices. For more information regarding our uniqueservices, visitwww.thinkstrategies.com, or contact us [email protected].

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