Nokia has been a customer of Socialtext for a year and a half. We are just now able to share some of the success story about how a pilot group has used Socialtext as an alternative to email for group productivity.
We began working with a small and forward thinking workgroup based in the United States using the Socialtext hosted service to collaborate on technology investment research. Usage seamlessly migrated to a Socialtext Appliance and as it grew globally, a second Appliance was deployed abroad.
I had an opportunity to visit their offices in Espoo, Finland and gain a greater in-person understanding of how they are advancing workplace culture in interesting ways. In Stockholm I presented on Group Productivity and Accreting Knowledge to a workshop on the future of Finnish business and society organized by the Synochus group. I presented alongside Suzanne Stein from Nokia's Insight & Foresight. unit.
Suzanne shared some of the benefits they anticipate by her group's participation in a pilot. Compared to other ways of working together, Socialtext promises to save time and accelerate projects. They found it easy to update the shared repository. The tool is designed with flexibility and movement in mind, making it possible to post from anywhere, like en route in a taxi. It offers convenience in checking a group's progress. This convenience enables the group to gather and leverage the knowledge of individuals, with minimal effort and high return to the contributors.
She sees that with a common touch point, group knowledge evolves and you gain access to extensions of a team throughtransparency. In other words, "the group finds you," when critical to know availability and skills of extended others in advance for forming project teams.
The Nokia Insight & Foresight team are advancing the active state of their workplace by encouraging use of Socialtext as an alternative to email. Suzanne pointed out the problems inherent with email: its too flexible with one-way handling (leading to occupational spam), no ability to scan, not shareable and provides no group memory. Instead of email, her group has vowed to try to use Socialtext and Instant Messaging in tandem as a pilot for productivity.
We are pleased to be working with such a prominent customer and the innovative team inside that are working in their own ways on things that change the way we live and work.