At Dreamforce in late November Marc Benioff announced “Chatter”, Salesforce’s online collaboration functionality, as their “biggest breakthrough ever”. Market and punditry reaction was generally favorable. And we are also excited because we believe the ultimate possibilities of this step into the world of online collaboration will be more significant than what Salesforce stated publicly.
To explain our prediction, first a bit of software history: Desktop software running on disconnected PCs without the ability to interconnect easily with other users focused by necessity on “intra-company workflows”, i.e. tasks a user could perform by him or herself. Tasks that over time grew more complex – or at least so did the applications designed to help with those tasks.
The Internet then introduced the ability to interconnect people, turbo-charged shortly by ever more ubiquitous wireless connectivity. However, many early online business management applications essentially sought to replicate desktop functionality instead of adding new, unique functionality that took advantage of the web’s interconnectivity. The true revolution of social networking applications like MySpace, Facebook, or Twitter, has been that they are indeed the first mainstream applications without a desktop predecessor that brought to millions functionality that was only possible through and meaningful in the interconnected world of the Internet.
Building on this progression, we believe it is time to think of “social networking” within business management applications as more than implementing Facebook or Twitter’s current social networking use cases, but to enable what we call “cross-company workflows”. Cross-company workflows refer to business-purpose interactions (e.g. business collaboration, project management, document sharing, real-time vendor management, etc.) as well as financial transactions (e.g. money flows between entities such as payments or payroll).
“Cross-company workflows” view business management as relationships and interactions, vs. solitary tasks where functional experts perform their work in relative isolation with less frequent exchanges. While cross-company capabilities like ERP and EDI have been interconnecting corporate users for decades, commensurate online capabilities have not become available down market. Now to usher in this Internet- and wireless-enabled world of anytime, anywhere business interactions and transactions we believe can be the real promise of Chatter.
The benefit of this model – as an addition, not replacement, to the more traditional “intra-company workflows” – is the real-time ability to communicate online, make joint decisions, or transfer money between entities and individuals. A vendor, for example, can connect with a potential customer (say, using Salesforce’s CRM application), and from there exchange RFPs and proposals, edit said documents, negotiate and settle on a price, conduct the project, handle invoices, and complete the final acceptance as well as exchange funds, all within the realm of a shared “cross-company workflow” application. In the process speeding up commerce, and reducing overhead, paper usage, and communication errors.
Should Salesforce seize this opportunity and use their newly launched technology base to truly enable real-time cross-company workflows, and thus revolutionize the speed and ease with which businesses – small or large – work together and make joint decisions, Chatter will indeed become Salesforce’s “biggest breakthrough ever”.
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