Avoiding Social Silos

By Dave Watson

The social networking phenomenon is truly global, with seemingly no regard for traditional communication limitations like borders, language, class, or age. In fact, research indicates that sites such as Facebook and Twitter now account for more of a user's online time than e-mail.

Business users, so comfortable with social networking environments in their personal lives, are primed and poised for access to the same type of applications in the business environment. They crave the ability to integrate core business applications integrated with an iPhone or BlackBerry, or to communicate with a finance manager in the same building just as easily as they can with a relative in another country.

As a result, we are seeing social networking collaboration functionality being added to enterprise application software, evidenced by new applications like Salesforce.com's Chatter, SAP's StreamWork, and Oracle's Fusion Activity Streams.

Implementing enterprise social collaboration has a somewhat unique set of challenges compared with the personal use of social networks. In our personal lives, social networks help us keep in touch with friends and family via messaging; share photos of new births, weddings, holidays, etc.; or stay up to date with the latest news. For business users, the tools might facilitate collaboration with colleagues, suppliers, and customers, or help track sales orders and shipments. Such business events do not originate when users type in messages, but from inside applications and associated business operations – a process that is described nicely in Kevin Swiggum's article, "Salesforce Chatter: Your Data is Talking to You!"

But there remains an integration challenge between core business applications and emerging social collaboration tools. While some vendors have vertically integrated tools within their application they have not addressed enterprise-wide integration or collaboration.

For instance, if a sales department uses Salesforce.com but shipping and billing is handled by SAP then there will be a problem: sales teams will collaborate using Chatter but the finance, warehouse, and distribution teams will connect within StreamWork. These tools are not interoperable, and as a result, the real-time collaboration will be lost and organizations will revert back to e-mails or phone calls. Without integration organizations will lose many of the benefits of real-time collaboration and mobile enablement tools.

iWay Software can help organizations overcome this challenge in three ways: by integrating silos, by interfacing between different tools, or via a platform such as our Activity Stream Broker, which can do away with silos altogether.

Firstly, iWay can help integrate the silos that exist in an organization. A sales team running Salesforce.com applications can get real-time bidirectional integration with SAP enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications and the finance, warehouse, and distribution teams can get the same capabilities with the Salesforce.com CRM applications. While this doesn’t solve the collaboration problem between Chatter and StreamWork, it at least means the teams can work with consistent common master reference data. With iWay Adapters this concept extends to other applications e.g. Lawson, JD Edwards, Oracle E-Business Suite, CICS, IMS, DB2, Tuxedo, AS/400, VMS, etc., and even external data such as B2B and EDI feeds.

Secondly, iWay can extend into Chatter and StreamWork applications directly. A Chatter user can interface with SAP directly without leaving Chatter, and, conversely, a StreamWork user can interface with Chatter directly without ever leaving StreamWork. SAP will then have the feel of a native Chatter application and Chatter will feel like a native StreamWork application. In this case, business users are empowered with transactional real-time integration and workflows between the applications that go beyond data consistency, as users in one application domain can make updates and initiate workflows and transactions in the other. For example, a finance director who lives in an SAP domain may be required to approve something that came from a sales director working in Salesforce.com. Or, that same finance director wants to send a note or message to the sales director before approval is given. This can all be accomplished via the integration of Chatter and StreamWork.

While this second scenario starts to break down the silos it still represents a challenge because it is essentially point-to-point integration. What happens when that same company introduces a Workday HR SaaS application or merges with another company that uses an Oracle Fusion electronic invoicing application?

That's where the third, and most strategic solution, Activity Stream Broker comes into play. Supported by iWay's CEP Enable and Service Manager, the Activity Stream Broker platform can:

• Discover raw transactions from a company’s heterogeneous application landscape
• Add context to the raw transactions to create business events
• Discover implicit and explicit relationships between business events
• Filter, correlate, and aggregate using dynamic business rules and analytics
• Add common context to business events such as topics and hashtags
• Feed events to multiple real-time social collaborative applications
• Create events based on the actions in multiple collaborative applications
• Provide transactional workflow-based integration back to source systems
• Monitor and analyze business events

The Activity Stream Broker platform can run on-premise, in the Cloud, or in both places. When deployed in a Cloud environment, it provides secure connectivity to all the enterprise applications that run in the data center. And the integration options support rich integration with applications such as Oracle, Salesforce, SAP, and beyond. Information can flow between the silos and transactions can move back to the source applications. It is this architected approach that can help organizations avoid the creation of new social silos and promote the use of real-time collaborative social applications in the enterprise.

About Dave Watson
iWay Software Vice President Dave Watson is responsible for the development, delivery, and support of iWay's integration products. Joining Information Builders in 2001, Mr. Watson holds a Computer Systems Engineering degree from the University of Bristol.