Social Workflow

I was talking with some friends at RightPoint the other day about Microsoft SharePoint customization, when it occurred to me that social tools, in the enterprise, will really only be great if work-flow can be built into the system.

Death by Document Management

As a project manager, I’ve often pondered: What if you could build the reporting into the work? I’ll tell you what would happen, time savings would happen. Can you convert time savings into a return on investment? You bet. How often do you find yourself managing different aspects of the same project with different tools? How cool is it to have to pull information from that series of documents to make an impromptu report for somebody on a moment’s notice?

Not very… That’s why big business is slow. There is too much duplication of effort built into reporting requirements.

By building the work-flow and reporting into the work itself, time isn’t wasted doing things over to report on. Specialized documents can still serve as artifacts attached to the overall effort, but I really think that the platform needs to be the information system, and not just the document management system. I also think that users need to utilize the platform for more than just socialized E-mail like communications.

I need to be able to do my job, by typing content directly into SharePoint, rather then by uploading documents to it. Typing the information directly into the system makes it dynamic and reportable, and would allow it to be shared socially through feeds, which would make it awesome.

What Do You Think?

That was my a-ha moment of the day the other day, but I want to know what your take is on the subject. Has everybody been talking about social workflow for ages and now I’m just catching up? Or does it not seem like anybody would be interested in an open communication system at work?