I was at a client yesterday who happens to use Salesforce.com as their CRM software, when I heard one of the sales team who had just returned from maternity leave exclaim 'Salesforce wants to be Facebook!'. This was followed by grumbles of agreement from her colleagues.
She was referring to the fact that the pioneer of Cloud software now invites you to connect with other users and to share things, in the same way as Facebook, LinkedIn et al do.
It got me thinking that this is an interesting trend where everyone and everything wants to copy the social networking model. Indeed, it's a tribute to the success of these sites when something as 90s as a CRM system (albeit one that came along in the 2000s and shook up the established players) is copying their features.
So is this just a large dose of 'me too' from Salesforce, or do these social features really add something? The additions are certainly treated with a healthy dose of cynicism by their users (a quick and highly unscientific straw poll of friends who use Salesforce drew similar sighs of derision).
Yet, one of the biggest problems with implementing CRM systems has always been getting salespeople to enter data into them, which can then be shared with others in the business to positive effect. I would argue that since social networking is now one of the main ways in which people are used to sharing stuff, applying the same principles should make it easier to share business information with colleagues.
It all sounds great in theory, but will it really work in practice? Well, there are already (and have been for a while) project collaboration tools (e.g. Huddle, Basecamp) that look not a million miles from social networking. And the trend in database back ends at the moment is towards less structured, flexible designs which can store information in different formats, and lend themselves more to the data streams of social networking than traditional records and child records.
So I wouldn't be hugely surprised if the next big enterprise software product looks more like LinkedIn than it does SAP. But what's more likely is that other CRM and project management products will integrate themselves much more with social networking tools and the lines between them all will become increasingly blurred
She was referring to the fact that the pioneer of Cloud software now invites you to connect with other users and to share things, in the same way as Facebook, LinkedIn et al do.
It got me thinking that this is an interesting trend where everyone and everything wants to copy the social networking model. Indeed, it's a tribute to the success of these sites when something as 90s as a CRM system (albeit one that came along in the 2000s and shook up the established players) is copying their features.
So is this just a large dose of 'me too' from Salesforce, or do these social features really add something? The additions are certainly treated with a healthy dose of cynicism by their users (a quick and highly unscientific straw poll of friends who use Salesforce drew similar sighs of derision).
Yet, one of the biggest problems with implementing CRM systems has always been getting salespeople to enter data into them, which can then be shared with others in the business to positive effect. I would argue that since social networking is now one of the main ways in which people are used to sharing stuff, applying the same principles should make it easier to share business information with colleagues.
It all sounds great in theory, but will it really work in practice? Well, there are already (and have been for a while) project collaboration tools (e.g. Huddle, Basecamp) that look not a million miles from social networking. And the trend in database back ends at the moment is towards less structured, flexible designs which can store information in different formats, and lend themselves more to the data streams of social networking than traditional records and child records.
So I wouldn't be hugely surprised if the next big enterprise software product looks more like LinkedIn than it does SAP. But what's more likely is that other CRM and project management products will integrate themselves much more with social networking tools and the lines between them all will become increasingly blurred
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