Published on the 01/08/2013 | Written by Newsdesk
A social network function able to gauge the mood and level of engagement of staff in order to allow employers to take action before the rot sets in is being developed by NewsGator…
Enterprise social networking specialist NewsGator is working on a version of its system that will allow employers to identify early which staff are losing interest in their work, or spot teams which appear to have gone off the boil. NewsGator CEO Daniel Kraft, in Australia this week for user meetings, said that a rudimentary version of the system was already working in the labs with a second iteration scheduled for March next year.
He expected a version for clients in 18-24 months. While that may seem distant, the prospect of a tool which can identify employee hot-spots early enough to allow intervention will have many organisations salivating. Kraft said that the initial version of the system would likely focus on team performance rather than individual behaviour patterns – but said that would still be able to identify for example that a particular sales team was not properly engaged, allowing action to be taken.
NewsGator claims around 30 local clients including Telstra, AMP, Stockland and the Reserve Bank of Australia. While many users harness the tool to facilitate communication, collaboration and support innovation, Kraft said it was being used for business process integration. An applications programming interface is available for the tool which allows developers to craft solutions that take data from SAP or Oracle systems for example, and serve that up in the NewsGator social network.
Besides providing a single environment from which employees can access corporate data Kraft said NewsGator allows organisations to capture conversations around business decision making. So, for example, if a salesperson has asked their manager for a discount to close a deal, the conversation surrounding that decision making is captured in NewsGator.
This then allows the enterprise to use NewsGator analytics to monitor exception handling processes in order to work out how to improve future decision making.
This version of the tool was only released in May, and has yet to secure any Australian users, but Kraft said that he expects enterprises operating in a highly regulated environment will be the likely early adopters – nominating banks, government, insurance and pharma companies.
It was this capability that was the springboard for the current research into analysing the “why of decisions” and scanning environments “to see the mood you are in”.
Kraft said that by analysing work and engagement patterns it should be possible to identify teams which were starting to disengage and hence implement early intervention programmes.
