Chatter is going to replace the way you collaborate with your colleagues. Today, it’s highly likely that you use email to communicate facts. Facts about deals, contracts, projects, requirements, personnel, hiring, etc. You probably also have a lot of status meetings. If you’re like most people, you have more meetings than you care for. You probably have a lot of memorandums, conference calls floating around. All the business communication tools you have at your disposal serve to relay important information.
Although I think it’s too radical to say it’s the end of Email, Status Reports, and Meetings, but, I would say that it certainly is going to make a dent in all three if Chatter is adopted and used throughout an enterprise. The real power of Chatter is record / context based threads. Imagine facebook, except you can ‘friend’ any opportunity, account, contact, etc and see its status updates, whether they are automatically posted by the record itself, or a colleague posts something interesting about it.
Let’s look at all three:
What is in your inbox these days? Do you get as much personal email as you use to? Probably not since you’ve started using Facebook in earnest. Your inbox is probably full of business communication. Multiple people on the cc line, you probably get 100s of emails where you are not the direct recipient, but, rather copied as an FYI. How much time do you spend sorting through it all, then searching and retrieving a piece of information later when you need it? If you’re like most people, email is not the most productive use of your time.
In comes Chatter to the rescue. Chatter should replace a great deal of the volume of the fact based emails you get. Why? Because facts can be communicated in context sensitive wall posts about a particular subject. When the Account manager on a large key account wants to publish a delay in the opportunity and the reason for it, she will post it on the opportunity’s wall. Those who care will be followers of the opportunity and can see the needed information. It makes the information available to all that need it, not just those privileged enough to be remembered to be copied on the cc line. Perhaps even more importantly, it creates a real time dialogue online that anyone can join in, creating an easy to manage context sensitive topic based thread. This is revolutionary.
The great thing is Facebook has already trained everyone on the concept of walls, posts, threads, and the user experience will have instant adoption.
For project management, I’ve already eliminated emails as a fact communicating tool even before Chatter. I’ve been using SFDC Ideas to post and track facts for years. Chatter will take this to the next step and make it intuitively easy for everyone to get with the concept that email is bad, real time as needed thread tracking is good.
Status Reports / Updates
Ask anyone where they rank their daily / weekly / monthly status reports on their ladder of job enjoyment and you’ll likely find a similar theme – everyone hates it.
Chatter, combined with scheduled sales force reports will provide the ability to end or seriously reduce the waste of needless status reports? Everyone that needs information will be able to access it in real time, when they need it. For the diehard status report recipient who refuse to logon, you can still send them whatever information is needed in a nice automated report. It works, as long as you can get your team to input the date into your apps.
Meetings
Who loves meetings? I haven’t met anyone in corporate America that will stand up and say they love meetings. People show up late, people that aren’t contributors ask a lot of questions.
If everyone has all the information they need simply by logging on, you can eliminate a lot of the more needless meetings. The idea behind real time information flow is that people don’t have to wait for a scheduled meeting to obtain information from others. It’s all online. In wall posts and relevant context based threads.
