The Connected Web

Sometimes it seems that we miss the most obvious things with all our buzzword discussions about cloud computing and social media. The essential change enabled by these technology artefacts is quite simply that we can all communicate and collaborate with each other while we're on the move. So here's a simple message to understand and act upon: businesses that can harness that essential change will outcompete their rivals because they will be able to react much faster while operating with much lower costs.

This was brought home to me when I had a preview of the new Chatter-enabled FinancialForce.com — an accounting application that incorporates Salesforce.com's Twitter-like notifications stream — ahead of its announcement last week [disclosure: Salesforce.com is a recent consulting client]. In fact, the vendor has gone further than simply Chatter-enabling its application (easy enough, as it is built on Salesforce's Force.com platform, which incorporates Chatter). It has released an application called Chatterbox, which can be used to build rules to initiate a Chatter stream around any Salesforce or Force.com object.

But what struck me was how the vendor is using its creation internally. The joint venture company that develops and sells the application is a geographically dispersed team of 55 staff working in six locations spread across the US, UK and Spain — on top of which, many are often homeworking or on the road — and they are all in constant contact with each other. Imagine how overstretched such a small organisation would have felt just a few years ago with such a dispersed operation. See how agile and efficient it can be using today's Internet-enabled collaboration technologies.

Of course there's a culture change that organisations have to undergo to make effective use of these tools. My initial reaction to the notion of putting Chatter technology into the accounts office was that you can't just graft this kind of interactive, collaborative infrastructure onto an organisation in which Clive and Doris in accounts just want to get the books closed and frankly would rather be skinned alive than have to try and exist on the same wavelength as Dave and his circus in sales. To reap the benefit of real-time collaborative technology, an organization needs to have a culture that's comfortable with open, quickfire dialog.

As a young, Web-savvy technology company, FinancialForce.com is a clear example of such a company. When it rolled out the Chatter technology internally, CEO Jeremy Roche told me, "It took about four hours from switch-on to adoption." In fact, the first thing the company had to do was to set down some rules discouraging people from posting content such as videos and images directly into their Chatter streams.

I think I'd now be very worried if I were running an established business that isn't open to these new ways of working — especially midmarket-sized enterprises that are most vulnerable to nimbler competitors (it will take longer for large enterprises to get worn down by small, upstart rivals, but don't discount that either in the longer term). This is the kind of disruptive business transformation that Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff is warning of when he talks about Cloud 2.

If you have teenage children, you probably already have an insight into the tactical advantage these constant collaboration streams can yield. I was hearing yesterday the story of a father driving his teenage daughter to a high school team competition. By the time they reached the destination, his daughter already knew which parking areas to head for because of advance intelligence from others who had arrived earlier. Texting en route had also already resolved another team member's forgotten socks with the loan of a spare pair. Imagine if the parents of another team had barred texting en route, how ill-prepared they would be in comparison. Now transfer that analogy to your business every time you arrive at a customer site in a competitive situation. Which team would you rather be?