Download V5 Press Release

Vuuch Enterprise Social Software Naturally Drives Actionable Outcomes

 

Sudbury, MA, April 9, 2012 – Vuuch, creator of the only deliverable-centric enterprise social software solution, today announced the availability of Vuuch™ V5. The new release includes deliverable-specific dashboards and timelines, Facebook-like threaded discussions, and integration with Microsoft Project^®. Altogether, the new features make it easier for teams to interact, discuss projects, and make better decisions, faster.

“Consumer social tools connect people based on relationships, sometimes called friending. First generation enterprise social software uses this inappropriate friending model for making connections. Vuuch is the only social @ work solution that connects people based on the work they are involved with. Deliverable centric connections allow a team to drive actionable outcome and channel the flow of information that leads to the conclusion of a project, and the conversation around it,” said Vuuch CEO Chris Williams. “The Vuuch deliverable-centric social approach keeps teams centered on what matters by centering discussions on the team’s deliverables.”

“Email accounts for a majority of our project collaboration, which leads to things falling through the cracks, or worse, valuable knowledge and information is lost. Vuuch not only centralizes this information, but also relates it to particular deliverables, such as parts and specs,” said Shane Bustle, Senior Design Engineer, Rubbermaid Medical Solutions. “The more we use Vuuch, the more we find it ensures our team is better synchronized, and able to reach decisions and complete projects faster.”

 

New and Improved Features in Vuuch V5

Deliverable-Centric Dashboards and Timelines: Every deliverable is represented in Vuuch with a Facebook-like Page, which displays related discussions as a dashboard for each person involved, and shows how the discussions converge with respect to the plan. Vuuch pages are organized in multiple structures and each node generates dashboards and timelines across the structure. This keeps a team centered on what matters most — project deliverables.

Facebook-Like Threaded Discussions: Vuuch V5 enhances activity threads by making the interaction work like Facebook, making it even easier to deploy Vuuch across everyone involved.

Integration with Microsoft Project: Project managers have forever tracked an issue list in addition to, or even in place of, their project plan. The Vuuch V5 plug-in for Microsoft Project rolls project details up to the Microsoft Project plan in real-time, so teams can fully understand how detailed issue impact the plan.

 

About Vuuch

Founded in 2009 and based in Sudbury, MA, Vuuch is a privately-held enterprise social software provider. Vuuch’s deliverable-centric social operations platform uses “social @ work” to improve business performance. Vuuch is the only enterprise social software that connects people based on deliverables, rather than relationships. Vuuch can run standalone or be integrated into desktop and enterprise applications used across the enterprise. Vuuch connects anyone anywhere, improves how work gets done, captures knowledge and fosters innovation. Vuuch is focused principally on interactions related to a customer’s product. For more information, visit Vuuch online at www.Vuuch.com

###

Vuuch is a trademark of SRD Systems, Inc. All other company and product names are the property of their respective owners.

Media Contact:
Larry Bouchie, TurboPR
Larry@TurboPR.com
781-620-0278

As we look forward to V6 we will rebrand our release naming, but more importantly new versions will start to extend the idea of social @ work and the social enterprise. Vuuch V5 completes the PLM promise, no matter if Vuuch is run standalone or integrated with a PLM system. New versions will borrow from Pinterst, allowing teams to crowd source concepts from a controlled crown and involve company experts on detailed project issues.

V5 Screen shots:

Enhancing quick moving, fluid, enterprise interaction is not only a business objective, it has become imperative to remain competitive attract a new generation of players and take a leap into the never level in productivity.

However, launching business social into the workplace can require a culture shift. It is vital that the business leaders carefully champion the process. The business needs to consider the mesh of features and benefits of the new social software and how the software will impact the business groups to achieve expected results.

There are many enterprise social software companies, like Jive Software, Yammer and even Linkedin that connect people in the business thru consumer approach of friending and following. It is our assertion that freinding simply doesn’t work for work and that friending reduces the potential ROI. At work people are connected by the work they do or the deliverables they are invovled with. The differences in how connections are made has a large impact on the potentail ROI. As a business leader how do you want your people to connect? While business needs can vary between companies, do you want people’s connection to mirror thier freindships at work or the work they are doing? How important is it to your core business for people to center thier collaboration on work versus relationships?

Richard Davis addressed these questions in his technology newsletter:
“…businesses don’t revolve around people per se, they are constructed to complete projects and solve problems.”

Rolling out an enterprise social software platform has the potential of reinventing the way people work, innovate and capture and reuse knowledge. But remeber the connection model is important.

It was not long ago when most, if not all, in the business world proclaimed there was no value in email and that we didn’t need it. Now email is a drug… we can’t get away from… and we check it while actually talking to people face-to-face. And although email ultimatly took hold in the enterprise it later fully penetrated the consumer world. And although Gmail started as a consumer grade email solutions it has come full circle to become enterprise grade solutions.

Social is early in the enterprise and like many enterprise solutions it will go through some gyrations before taking hold. It is not news that consumers have beat down the door step of social well before the enterprise. So why is the enterprise dragging behind? Well you could say that you ”Can’t teach old dogs new tricks” or maybe at work humans resist change… Well CRM took time before businesses were hooked. Actually the CRM hook came when it went cloud, al la Salesforce.com. PLM (for those not embroiled in the world of product development – Product Lifecycle Management) took forever to take hold, and some would say it is still far from a standard or wide spread solution. Autodesk is taking a play out of the Salesforce book and betting on the cloud to be the fuel of growth. Autodesk may be onto something here as today’s modern product development environment is dispersed across partners and suppliers.

The enterprise led the email charge and consumers followed. If you think the enterprise will not follow the consumer into social solutions then you have your head in the sand. Enterprise social software or social @ work is well underway, pick the sand out of your ears and don’t miss the train.

Is content curation a trend or must-have? Of course, creating original content is ideal, but it is also time consuming and it is hard to ignore all the digital content already sitting around. Social sites such as Twitter and Facebook are not just for socializing: they are also tremendous marketing tools and a way to share and source ideas. Perhaps these ideas can be focused internal to your business.

What is content curation?

Content curation involves finding quality content that may be of interest to an audience, adding valuable commentary and distributing it in some fashion.

Now think about the impact it could have in business. Enterprise curation from the inside could help your employees feel like they are a valued part of the company, giving them a more active role in decision making processes, reduce time need to create ideas and allow a business to find better ideas faster.

The role of the storyboard

Consider the role of the storyboard for new product development. When a company is thinking about developing a new product they put together storyboards, outlining details of the product. Clothing businesses use storyboards to display colors and fabrics. Visualization is a powerful technique. So why not bring the concept of the storyboard into the future, digitalizing it and outsourcing ideas within the enterprise?

Take a moment to think about the impact of Pinterest. Although Pinterest may be considered a consumer social site, it has certainly become an incredible advertising tool. Users create Pinterest accounts and start “pinning” items they think are worth sharing or interesting. Their followers can click on the items and then be taken to the website where the curated item came from. Within your enterprise, your followers would be your employees and business partners. With this being the direction of ecommerce, it would be naive to ignore the impact that this type of enterprise curation could have within your business. Digital storyboards could be shared with external partners, customers and prospects giving the business the ability to source from a controlled crowd.

Employee Centered

Giving your employees a way to virtually brainstorm using the power of visualization can allow them to throw ideas out there when appropriate instead of setting up a meeting. Think of how many ideas may be missed becuase meetings are held to a firm start and end whereas virtual curration can happen when an idea sparks and across many more minds. A virtual storyboard would allow them to post an idea and gather feedback from other employees or advice on how to make the idea work.

Enterprise curation done properly

Don’t run off to the book story looking for Enterprise Curation for Dummies, it hasn’t been written just yet. Get your people thinking about this and look for ways the team can:

• Easily search for applicable content
• Efficiently collect and add commentary to that content
• Presenting and share what is currated

Enterprise curation may not be ideal for every business and it may take some time and effort to build a successful platform, but I think it is certainly an idea worth brainstorming.

]]> http://www.vuuch.com/enterprise-social-system/the-role-of-content-curation-in-the-enterprise/2012/03/22/feed 0 http://www.vuuch.com/plm/the-role-of-content-curation-in-business/2012/03/18 http://www.vuuch.com/plm/the-role-of-content-curation-in-business/2012/03/18#comments Sun, 18 Mar 2012 12:34:42 +0000 Chris Williams http://www.vuuch.com/?p=5473 Thanks to the Internet, we’re now living in an age with a truly astounding access to data. In fact, there’s so much readily-available data out there that it’s virtually impossible for an individual to grasp even a tiny portion of it. So, it’s no surprise that content curation has become [...]]]> Thanks to the Internet, we’re now living in an age with a truly astounding access to data. In fact, there’s so much readily-available data out there that it’s virtually impossible for an individual to grasp even a tiny portion of it. So, it’s no surprise that content curation has become one of the linchpins of the Internet. The private sector understood the need for it quickly, almost automatically. Just look at social sites such as Facebook, www.Pinterest.com and www.flow.net (www.iflow.com), and how they allow people to gather interesting data in one place. Users then create networks of people with similar interests, all working together to cull the proverbial wheat from the chaff, making the wealth of information on the Internet manageable.

Yet, businesses have been slow to grasp the inherent utility of content curation. Enterprise curation is still only in its infancy, perhaps due to the “top-down” hierarchical nature of most businesses. However, for businesses willing to experiment, enterprise curation can be a powerful tool for formulating new ideas and strategies.

This sort of collaborative process isn’t totally unheard of in the business world. It could be likened to the “storyboarding” process in product development. A storyboard is a set of drawings that tell the story of what the product could be before anything is actually committed. Many companies turn this into a collaborative effort, allowing everyone to see these storyboards, move them around, add their own ideas, and make suggestions to improve the concept. A project manager at Rubbermaid Medical explained they do this on large whiteboards and each person uses yellow sticky notes to post comments and vote on the ideas they like. Enterprise curation would expand this idea to cover all manner of ideation within a company.

We’ve all heard stories of the frustrated “little guys” in a company with great ideas but no outlet for them. We’ve also all heard stories about the individual with a great idea but no way to to execute - which is an idea that has not gone un-noticed – companies like Quirky and AHHHA are allowing individuals to become product developers by engaging a community.

If your company is developing a car, and a junior staff member just read an article online about a new prototype engine in Japan, they could attach that article to the project and see if any of the engineers saw value in it. Since there is so much data online, anyone in your company could be the one that stumbled upon the vital piece of information that gives the company an edge. Exposing virtual storyboards to prospects and customers would allow a team to engage the ultimate buyer in both the ideation and voting process. To do this, you’d need a project centric collaborative curation space of some sort. This could be as simple as an internal bulletin board system, or a more complex graphical environment geared specifically for enterprise curation.

The hurdle is most likly the fostering of the sort of openness that cuts across organizational hierarchies needed for the content curation to work. While this wouldn’t be an entirely democratic space, employees would need to feel free to contribute and believe their voice matters. Authoritarian moderation of the content should be kept to a minimum - creating a place where employees, partners and customers could designate ideas and drive the creatative, collaborative, curation of ideas that could change the business. Further, that’s not to say that this space would be given free rein. There would absolutely be a need for managers and “idea guys” to watch over the discussion and decide which ideas would be truly beneficial.

While I expect this may be a challenging concept for a lot of businesses, enterprise curation will give you a new source of ideas, directly from people who have a vested interest in seeing your company thrive - its own employees – generating better products, making use of the latest ideas, and get a better-motivated and inspired workforce as well.

So, we’re simply left with a question:  could enterprise curation help your business?

A better business model

Innovation, decision making and problem solving are unstructured and ad hoc. Purely adding more people to a discussion will not garrentee a better or shorter outcome. As well innovation, decision making and problem solving are not something that can be delivered thru workflow. A business social solution that guides the ad hoc approach can have a dramatic impact.

Deliverables are the key

In business people come to work to work on and deliver deliverables. People collaborate on deliverables. People connect based on deliverables. A business social solution better understand why people are connected. A business social solution better make deliverable centric connections.

Excite and support but DO NOT force fit

We all know email is not going away soon so the right solution will embrace email as well as the other applications people are using today. The right solution will realize that not everyone will become a user. Some people may decide to stay in email…

Enterprise social software is proving to be the key to busting through the performance thresholds that previously shackled project teams. Of course projects get planned but this is not where the problem lies. The real problems start when the team needs to execute the project and track progress. And we all know what happens… the plan is out the window, because sh!t happens and the beautiful project plan is reduced to an issue or task list.

How can enterprise social software, business social or social @ work help:

• Communication The first and major advantage of enterprise social software is communication. Communicating project progress no longer has to be done in weekly team meetings. Of course teams have been trying to solve this problem with email, but the problem is there is no way to keep it organized across the team and everyone just becomes flooded in messages. A business social solution that is focused on helping a team conclude the discussions and is focused on deliverables will drive awareness and improved communication.

• Project execution The second reason for rolling out enterprise social software is to directly affect operating metrics. We all know that when it comes to executing a project, exceptions are the rule and that a chain of command can sometimes slow the process. Using project centric social circles to problem solve in an ad hoc manner can turn tomorrow’s progress meeting into yesterdays news. With this in mind, team meetings can become a thing of the past.

• Accountability A third and equally important advantage of using enterprise social software is the cultivation of a spirit of competitiveness and pride in work. Each component of a project team will be clearly responsible and on display for their failures and achievements. This will empower project team members to produce tangible results and share their progress. It also breeds an awareness of a participant’s importance to each stage of a project. Making project centric connections makes it easy to connect with those that are directly involved in or have a stakeholder interest in a project.

• Staying focused on what matters The way in which information is shared through a unified platform that can be adopted with plug-ins for commonly used software, suggests that there will be no distraction from day to day activities or a need to ‘remember’ to check for updates or emails.

There are companies like Jive Software that started as social CRM and companies like Yammer which started as Twitter for your company, both of which now position themselves as Facebook for your business. See any parallels? Can you really see employees pouring over their business Facebook looking for a status change on a hot project? How can Facebook for business work? At work people connect based on sharing work on deliverables, not because they are friends…

Take a case when a group of people will come together to solve a customer complaint logged in Salesforce. These people are not friends and certainly it would make no sense to blast out to all your friends you have a customer problem, hoping one can fix it. In this case the customer problem is the center of the conversation and an enterprise social solution should understand this.

Before Facebook there was Myspace, not to mention the dozen or so other sites to make their way into the online sphere, but only Facebook is Facebook and it stands to reason that many of these business social tools will become the Myspace of enterprise social software. Richard Davies writes about the Myspacing facing enterprise social software companies http://www.vuuch.com/social-media/chatting-with-richard-davis/2011/12/15.

This enterprise social networking phenomenon has caught the eye of many industry players and analysts and many customers are just jumping right in. The hot topic today is Yammer, after raising $85M in venture money and Gartner has begun doing research on business social and what it will look like in 2016. http://www.gartner.com/technology/reprints.do?id=1-18KGCU0&ct=120105&st=sb. In addition other companies have been doing research into this business model, such as Deloitte, who did a story discussing both the short and long-term benefits of enterprise social networking. http://www.deloitte.com/view/en_US/us/Industries/technology/e9c1b39fb701e210VgnVCM3000001c56f00aRCRD.htm

Many of these business social tools have “Facebook DNA”. Yammer shares a founder with Facebook in Sean Parker, as well as one of its investors and other valley companies like ASANA have large number of Facebookers. Many Fortune 500 companies, such as Nationwide, Orbitz and Ford have jumped in, but it will be interesting to see what features propel the leader forward making them the Facebook of the enterprise. Who know maybe Justin Timberlake will end up owning a few enterprise social software companies as well…

There is no doubt about it, enterprise social networking is changing the way business does business; from the way colleagues connect to how partners discuss issues with their clients. There are many companies striving to fill this new need, a need that can only be filled by a business minded company that understands the unique needs of a business and a platform that is really much more than Facebook for business.

Facebook changed the way generations stay in touch. Linked-in changed the way business people stayed connected and found jobs. Now enterprise social software such as Jive software, Yammer and Vuuch are changing the way employees stay in touch and how companies broadcast business information to their employees. The objective behind the creation of business social software is to improve employee efficiency, organizational productivity, innovation and knowledge capture. Jive software and Yammer deliver Facebook and Twitter functionality and call themselves a business version of Facebook and they work just like Facebook or Twitter in that employees friend each other, create discussions, view status updates and exchange files. Also see comments by Richard Davis http://www.vuuch.com/social-media/chatting-with-richard-davis/2011/12/15.

When too many people are connected there is a rush of data that creates an overflow or fire-hose of information. Sorting through Twitter feeds or Facebook feeds can be a daunting task. Fortunately these feeds are not about getting work done so missing comments here and there is not that big a deal. Jive software and Yammer allow managers, employees, partners and customers to fire-hose messages to all your followers. Jive recognized the fire-hose problem and added a feature, thru and acquisition, called ”what matters”.  The “what matters” button is supposed to figure out what you need to know and filter the noise for you…

Keeping everyone well informed about day-to-day developments makes sense. But at work people interact, collaborate and have discussions about specific business deliverables. You could say social connections at work are deliverable centric. Better communication means getting what you need, when you need it, which means message streams and status updates need to be deliverable specific, so users can quickly find the updates they need. Simply said, friending doesn’t work for work. What business needs is an enterprise social software that captures the core of why people are connected, organizes discussions and interaction based on business deliverables, squelches the social fire-hose and allows a team to execute projects, innovate and capture knowledge about how the work gets done. What business needs is a deliverable centric enterprise social software solution.