Banking Review

Yammer on

Real-time staff collaboration and being able to find an expert in-house is now a lot easier as large organisations adopt social tools

BY CHARIS PALMER

Australian banks are doing little to formally embrace enterprise social software, but that isn’t stopping such software from seeping its way into everyday use.

Nearly all of Australia’s major banks currently have staff using Yammer, but only Suncorp has formally encouraged use across the enterprise. “It has made a big difference to the way we work,” says an Internet banking specialist inside the bank.

“To be able to collaborate in an informal and immediate forum such as Yammer certainly makes our jobs a lot easier.” Yammer, a microblogging tool that allows individuals inside corporations to share data and documents in real-time, was introduced to Suncorp by the bank’s IT team, under the leadership of chief information officer Jeff Smith. The bank now has almost 2, 200 people (about 15 per cent of its staff) using it, and says more people from outside the IT team continue to get on board.

ANZ is currently piloting the tool, with a spokesperson for the bank telling Retail Banking Review, “We were particularly interested in the capabilities it offers in ‘find an expert’ across a large organisation”.

Both NAB and AMP also have a range of staff using Yammer, but each firm has let use of Yammer evolve virally. “Like other corporates, AMP is using social media tools like Yammer informally,” says an AMP spokesperson. “There have been a few instances where it has been used to engage with staff about company developments like a new marketing campaign, but generally only a few teams use it regularly at this stage.”

Cloud-based CRM software provider Salesforce.com recently joined Yammer and enterprise social software providers Socialcast, and StatusNet, with the launch of Salesforce Chatter, a tool designed to encourage real-time staff collaboration.

Both Salesforce and Yammer have heavily leveraged the popularity of Facebook, implementing real-time feeds, profiles and status updates that look and feel very much like those on Facebook.

Talking it up

Salesforce says its Chatter tool enables enterprises to collaborate around more than just documents. “Employees can also follow people, business processes and application data.”

US insurance group Farmers Insurance says Salesforce Chatter has helped its advertising team collaborate across marketing initiatives.

“What’s been most amazing about Chatter is how it leverages a secure platform with a trusted sharing model to enable continuous collaboration within the enterprise,” says Mitch Varhula, marketing consultant with Farmers Insurance.

Salesforce is hoping to convince its existing base of 77,000 enterprise customers to sign up for Chatter. Yammer already has 70,000 organisations using its tool, however a much smaller number are paid customers.

“Yammer was the first company to bring real-time feeds into the enterprise, and clearly this is an idea whose time has come,” says Yammer chief executive officer David Sacks.

Yammer recently announced integration with Microsoft SharePoint 2007, helping to further encourage real-time communication alongside more traditional document sharing.

By using an interface most people are now familiar with, enterprise social collaboration tool providers have been able to get viral uptake, but some say this approach could do more harm than good for the companies involved.

“Successful employee communities don’t just rise up from the ground without a proper foundation – they are built one step at a time in measured, well-planned steps,” says Socialcast director of marketing and client communications Carrie Young. “Unless an employee community is aligned with a company’s business drivers, it runs a great risk of becoming just a virtual water cooler that falls outside of the sanctioned, and legal boundaries of a company’s communication system.”

Young cautions enterprises against letting social collaboration tools grow virally without senior management support: “Large global enterprises cannot depend on bottoms-up and grass-roots excitement to build a viable, compliant, secure community for long-term use”.