How to Optimize Social Collaboration? SAP Jam Gives the Answer.

Companies are constantly faced with new external and internal challenges. That’s nothing new. But now, in times of the digital transformation, it is all the more important to face the ever-present challenges in the company together.

More and More on the Advance: Social Networks

Over the past years, social networks like XING and LinkedIn have become increasingly important in the professional environment. These social networks are perfectly suited for collecting and publishing (industry-related) information or networking with business partners — be they customers, suppliers or interested parties. The social networks were thus designed to be suitable for the external communication and networking of companies.

Within companies, the social networks XING and LinkedIn are hardly used, if at all. Users perceive them as private networks, and they do not offer any added value to companies in terms of internal use. And yet social collaboration is more important than ever these days, with companies aiming to increase work efficiency, initiate innovations and promote an exchange between companies.

Go beyond Common Limits with SAP Jam

While this is the approach that useful tools such as SharePoint, Skype for Business, company-internal intranets, wikis or blogs take, they quickly reach their limits when it comes to interaction, collaboration and intuition. This is the case in particular when the focus is not only on permanent project work but also on the important day-to-day business.

Is there no platform that uses the basic properties of various different tools and makes them accessible to the employees of a company? This is exactly where SAP Jam, the cloud-based social collaboration platform from SAP, comes in.

But What Exactly Is Social Collaboration?

Generally speaking, social collaboration refers to the collaboration between people in projects, groups or teams with the assistance of the Internet and electronic media. It is not merely the purely technical aspects that play an important part here but rather the changed sociocultural development of communication behavior and the style in which the people involved work together on joint projects.

SAP Jam: Making Corporate Processes Social

Nowadays, the market environment of social collaboration tools and programs is huge, and almost all software manufacturers of worldwide renown have a product in their portfolio that covers the requirements of social collaboration fully or at least for the most part. But why should a company that already relies on SAP choose a solution from a different manufacturer when the SAP Jam solution is right in front of them? Why push the integration of an external cross-company platform if many advantages, such as single sign-on, mobile, networked, cross-location ad-hoc access via the browser or app and integration into the existing SAP environment are quick and easy to obtain? It is not often this easy to avoid unnecessary costs and save precious time that can be far better invested in maintaining the company’s ability to compete in competitive markets.

Networked Internal and External Support and Cooperation

SAP Jam makes external processes social, not only within departments but also across departments and within the company. While it is possible to use SAP Jam as a stand-alone solution, more added value is created when additional SAP cloud solutions are connected, for example by integrating SAP Hybris Cloud for Customer or SAP Customer Relationship Management.

Would you like to learn more about SAP Jam? Just send me an e-mail. I’m looking forward to hearing from you!

by Lukas Wissing, Young Professional Consultant, Customer Engagement and Commerce, NTT DATA Business Solutions AG

E-mail: [email protected]