An Oracle White Paper

August 2014

Oracle Social Network

Oracle Social Network

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Introduction

Traditional enterprise collaboration models require users to leave what they’re doing and interact with a completely external tool to get the communication services they need. Oracle Social Network was developed in response to this productivity-draining model, instead providing completely seamless integration with Oracle Cloud Applications and other Oracle Cloud services. With Oracle Social Network, communication services are woven directly in to the application users are working with—they never have to break context, and communication can center on specific work objects, if desired, or extend to a broader milieu. Oracle Social Network allows users to collaborate with everyone connected with the job they’re trying to do, in the context they’re trying to do it in.

The Collaboration Gap

Collaboration is absolutely fundamental to today’s corporate world, whether it’s preparing materials within a team to present to a potential opportunity, working with other specialists to solve a customer support case, evaluating the results of the company in the last quarter, or bringing a new team member up to speed on a project and defining his or her productivity goals. Today these collaborative activities take place outside of the application—in email, chats, phone calls, or disconnected social networks—and typically are not recorded completely or in a single location. Perhaps most frustratingly, there is no association between these collaborative activities and the underlying business systems that track the work – the opportunities in the CRM application, the issues in the support system, or the quarterly results in the ERP application. As a result, new stakeholders joining an already existing work effort have to piece things together to come up to speed, reading lengthy email chains that someone else has to forward to them, talking to other team members to catch up on what’s already happened, and so on—a lengthy, error-prone process for all involved. At best, this situation squanders a great deal of precious time. At worst, decisions are made without factoring in critical information that was available elsewhere in the organization—but not where and when the decision maker needed it. To compound the problem, past experience is usually poorly documented and not centrally available, so decision makers have no record of how exceptions were resolved previously, potentially causing them to repeat past mistakes and to apply rules inconsistently across the organization. In addition, current software-based collaboration solutions require users to choose the communication medium (and therefore its membership) in advance – picking up a phone, sending an email, micro-blogging – before even determining if that’s the appropriate mechanism or set of participants for the discussion. What’s required for true collaboration, by contrast, is the exact opposite—that is, face-to-face interaction in which additional people, voice, text, documents, presentations, and whiteboards can be brought in as needed or desired. Without these components, one must replay or reschedule discussions again and again until the right combination of context, history, tools, and people is found.

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To avoid these problems, enterprises have begun to turn to systems-of-engagement, modeled after consumer social tools, which provide an environment where employees willingly spend time, where they can communicate, participate, and offer expertise and broaden their networks. Such a system not only enriches and improves employees’ work deliverables, but also augments their personal engagement with the business. Traditional systems-of-record are actually the reverse of systems-of-engagement: the individual sees little to no value in participating in these types of systems, and generally consider them a burden to maintain. The ideal environment allows system-of-record data to be easily maintained, provides managerial and corporate insight, and makes it simple to disseminate information about changes or updates to individuals throughout the organization—even to those who may not realize they have a need to know. In other words, what’s needed is a solution for handling enterprise collaboration that reflects the best of consumer style social models, preserves both context and history, allows the lists of participants to shift as needed, and provides the appropriate media required for a given communication. It must preserve the ease and fluidity of email, IM, and mobile group messaging, while tightly integrating with enterprise applications and software infrastructure. It must extend into as well as out of systems-of-record, placing the collaboration in-context and bringing the key record data of the context into the collaborative application. Otherwise, it risks becoming yet another enterprise workflow application with its own set of exceptions (project management applications are notorious for this failing)—or just another “inbox”, another silo of collaboration data to deal with.

Oracle Social Network

Oracle Social Network addresses this “collaboration gap” by providing a system-of-engagement in which individuals can collaborate, network, drive decisions, and update data, both while pursuing a focused business objective or while merely browsing collected information, which may lead to serendipitous discovery. Deeply intertwined with Oracle business applications, Oracle Social Network allows users to collaborate with each other directly inside—and in the context of—the applications they use on a daily basis. By socializing enterprise applications, business processes, and content, Oracle Social Network enables the “social business”. Oracle Social Network offers a collaboration and networking platform that connects people with applications, processes, and content as well as with each other—which means you get a system that engages the individual, rather than yet another system that demands action. Oracle Social Network facilitates cross-enterprise knowledge, and protects you against inadvertently creating yet another silo of lost information.

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User Experience

Regardless of whether a collaboration tool is designed for personal use (like Facebook) or for business use within the enterprise, it’s critical that the tool provide a recognizable, easy to use, and cutting edge user experience. This user experience must enable real-time responses, so people can enjoy instant two-way communication, and provide access to information at any location, from any device—web, mobile, tablet, or desktop applications. Oracle Social Network delivers these requirements, but goes many steps beyond what other tools can offer by offering users a choice of whether to collaborate inside the Applications or in a standalone social user experience.

Oracle Cloud Applications users can collaborate on business records from within the Application’s user experience--on web, mobile, or tablet interfaces—which means they can engage with others right from the business system itself. In other words, because Oracle Social Network’s rich, pre-integrated social components are embedded into the Application UX, working socially essentially becomes a core element of Oracle Applications. If preferred, users can choose to work within a Facebook-like user experience, while still maintaining the context of the business application. This enables individuals who are not users of the Applications to still collaborate—for example, product experts who are not in Oracle Sales Cloud can go to the standalone social user experience to answer questions from the sales team about an Opportunity. Additionally, Applications users can interact with the standalone social interface to engage in focused collaborative activities from any supported device.

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Foundations of Oracle Social Network

Interaction in Oracle Social Network is built upon four key constructs:

People

A core foundation of any successful enterprise social network is the ability for people to establish their professional online social identity within the company. Oracle Social Network provides a secure place for people to come together, to collaborate, to learn about each other’s interests, skills, and experiences, and most importantly, to share useful information across the organization. Oracle Social Network’s Social Profile pages allow each person to learn more about others they work with, and establish a professional identity in the workplace—which may include one’s interests outside of the workplace as well.

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Each individual gets a wall on which to share interesting knowledge across the organization. Others can choose to follow and contribute to an individual’s wall. For example, sales leaders using Oracle Social Network with Oracle Sales Cloud commonly use their walls to communicate key wins and kudos, partner events, upcoming product training, and selling tips. Sales representatives then follow these leaders, both those in their direct management chain as well as individuals of interest across the company, regardless of organization or geography. This communication can increase overall organizational knowledge and build strong ties between people in distributed organizations. Additionally, Oracle Social Network provides the ability to create Groups of interest, enabling teams to come together in a common place (the Group’s wall) to share knowledge and engage in group discussions.

Social Objects

Oracle Social Network is seamlessly integrated with Oracle Applications, which provide the engine for many companies’ daily activities. This makes sense, given that the impulse to communicate is often driven by new or updated information surfaced within enterprise applications or business processes. From directly within an Oracle Application, you can choose to designate a business record as a “Social Object”, which makes it eligible for collaboration with other team members. The Social Object represents and reflects the business record both within the Application as well as within the standalone social network experience.

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Once a business record has been designated as a Social Object, users can post directly to the object’s wall, to share important messages with other team members, add documents and other content to share and review, and assign team members actions. Users can easily add others within the enterprise to the Social Object, allowing them to read and contribute to the activity on the business record—even if they don’t have access to the underlying Application itself. Additionally, when select updates are made on the underlying business record, those changes are published to the Social Object’s wall for all to see. This enables everyone to see important updates and take appropriate actions based on those changes--- for example, getting to work on the sales contract document after a sales opportunity moves to a later stage of the sales process.

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From within the standalone Oracle Social Network user experience, any user collaborating

on a Social Object can see key information coming directly from the business system—

which in turn provides greater context and thus more meaningful engagements and better

decision-making.

Conversations

Oracle Social Network’s central collaboration object is the Conversation. Conversations enable discussions on any subject in real-time, while storing a full history of the collaboration for later use.

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Although Conversations start with only one participant, it’s easy to add more people to the Conversation when needed. You can have closed, secure private Conversations, or public discussions that are open to the whole community. New participants can review, comment on, or pose questions about anything that’s transpired in the Conversation prior to their addition, which makes it easy to on-board new employees or those who recently joined a given project. Conversations can include documents, annotations, and application collaboration (like web conferencing) as the interaction requires. Real-time presence indicators and notifications are available to highlight required participation and determine the most appropriate medium on the fly, rather than relying solely on pre-scheduled, structured meetings. Participants who are unable to engage in real-time communication can still participate via text, voice notes, or video, and can review and annotate the results of any Conversation they may have missed. You can choose to receive notifications, updates, and digests of Conversations so you can catch up later—even from your mobile device, if you so choose.

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Conversations can also be related to Social Objects, allowing for sidebar discussions on business records. You can limit the participation on key Social Objects so that communication about them occurs in a completely private and secure environment.

Content

The focus of any knowledge-based enterprise is producing, reviewing, and publishing content. Whether responding to requests for proposals, searching for the best presentation, designing marketing campaigns, addressing customer problems, or writing policies and contracts, all such enterprises revolve around working with content collaboratively. Oracle Social Network provides specific tools to facilitate sharing, gather feedback, and promote the re-use of content, documents, images, and other rich media. Real-time annotation, versioning, and organization tools greatly enhance the collaborative content processes and promote the flow of information between people and groups on a daily basis.

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Conclusion

Oracle Social Network addresses the “collaboration gap” of the traditional tool-centered approach that requires the user to break context to communicate and prevents the expansion of organizational knowledge. As an integrated element of Oracle Applications, Oracle Social Network is uniquely able to facilitate purposeful collaboration in the context of the business. Whether accessed directly from within Oracle Applications or via the standalone user experiences, Oracle Social Network provides cutting edge but intuitive collaboration capabilities that are easily used by anyone. The four foundations of Oracle Social Network—People, Social Objects, Conversations, and Content—provide all of the tools you need to maximize the social and collaborative activities within your enterprise.

Oracle Social Network

October 2014

Authors: Marcie Caccamo, Andy Kershaw, Josh

Lannin

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