“Out with email and in with chat presence to boost office productivity?”

– Rajiv Khanna – PPIC Software Solutions

The following article written by: Daniel Harris, Software Advice

Most instant messaging (IM) software includes a functionality known as online chat presence: a status display indicating whether you, as well as others in your contact list, are available to chat. Effective use can boost workplace productivity, but presence can also interrupt workflows if best practices aren’t in place.

To identify some of these best practices, we surveyed employees who use IM and chat technology for workplace communications. This report will explore the major productivity benefits of the presence functionality included in business phone systems designed for use with VoIP service.

Introduction

Instant messaging solutions have been widely available since the late 1990s. These solutions utilize presence functionality in its most basic and widespread form: as contact lists that display whether friends and family are logged in and available to talk. However, a more advanced form of this technology—“rich presence”—is now offered by common instant messaging clients, such as Microsoft Lync and Google Hangouts.

Bern Elliot, research vice president at Gartner, is a leading expert on workplace presence technologies.

He explains that “rich presence adds information, so it’s multi-value.” Standard presence, on the other hand, is “binary,” meaning it only shows two values: logged in and logged out.

The chart below shows the most common (and most important) types of information offered by rich presence technology:

Elements of Rich Presence

Rich presence functionality is included in many business phone systems designed for use with VoIP service. Such systems are known as unified communications (UC) solutions, thanks to the fact that they unite modes of communication such as voice calling, video calling, instant messaging, voicemail and email within a single application interface. Rich presence helps users navigate these different communication options.

With so many options to choose from, businesses must determine which types of presence information can yield the most significant operational benefits. Additionally, there’s a risk that presence displays may actually

The essential problem is the technology’s real-time nature. For example, if an employee sets her status to “available,” she may be bombarded with communications from co-workers. This may tempt her to simply turn presence functionality off—thereby eliminating its potential to facilitate collaboration.

The scenario we’ve just considered shows why it’s important to identify best practices around updating presence information. With the right guidelines in place, presence can streamline collaboration rather than cause distraction.

More Employees Report Productivity Increases Than Decreases

First, we asked respondents how setting their presence status to “available” affects their productivity, since this action invites potentially interruptive messages. As it turns out, nearly half of respondents say setting their status to “available” actually increases their productivity.

Impact of ‘Available’ Presence Status on Workplace Productivity

While 47 percent of our sample reports a productivity boost, only 21 percent reports a decrease in productivity caused by updating their online chat presence status. Additionally, nearly one-third of respondents don’t see any impact on their productivity from updating their status.

These findings indicate that presence can offer substantial productivity benefits, though we can also see that these benefits are hardly universal. Best practices need to be in place in order to maximize the technology’s potential.

Distractions Caused by ‘Available’ Presence Are Minimal

In order to get a more detailed sense of how presence impacts workplace productivity, we asked respondents how distracting they find the messages coworkers send them while their status is set to “available.” The vast majority find them distracting to some degree, though a slight majority of these respondents say the distraction is only minimal:

Degree of Distraction by Messages Sent When Status Is ‘Available’

One noteworthy finding: Nearly one-third of respondents don’t find presence distracting at all. This is fairly remarkable, given that incoming messages in most applications produce noise and may even display as pop-ups in the window the employee is working in. However, it’s clear that employees have grown so accustomed to this type of real-time communication that their workflows aren’t interrupted by it.

On the other hand, the fact that 70 percent of our sample reports at least a minimal level of distraction upon updating their presence display is cause for concern. Given this finding, it’s important to identify the productivity benefits of presence technology that compensate for the distraction that it creates for most employees.

However, Elliot makes an important point:

In other words, while presence may result in low-level distractions, it can still serve as a key tool in coordinating and strengthening collaborative workflows.

Top Benefit of Presence Technology Is Fewer Calls and Emails

Digging deeper, we asked our sample what major benefits they experience by setting their presence to “available.” Looking at their answers, we can see that presence compensates for the minor distractions it causes by reducing other, far more significant sources of distraction:

Top Productivity Benefits of Using Presence Displays

While instant messages can be distracting, 21st-century knowledge workers are all too familiar with how quickly voicemail and email can become black holes, consuming significant chunks of the workday. Three-fourths of our sample believe presence technology is a useful tool for avoiding the greater distractions caused by more traditional forms of communication.

Another major benefit of presence is its ability to expedite the handling of simple questions and issues. After all, spending time searching for the answer to a straightforward yet pressing question is a much more significant workflow interruption than spending time responding to an instant message.

One capability that can be particularly helpful in this context is the ability to update presence information for groups as well as individuals. This allows employees to easily find someone who is in the right role to resolve an issue—for example, a manager, in the case that the employee needs managerial approval for a given workflow process.

The ability of presence technology to speed the resolution of simple issues is especially important for remote workers, for whom in-person communication isn’t an option. Indeed, more than half our sample views the facilitation of remote work as a major benefit.

Only 2 percent of respondents see no benefits in presence technology, which is remarkably low. Clearly, the benefits it offers for the vast majority of employees more than compensates for the distractions it can occasionally cause. What, then, are some best practices that can maximize the beneficial impact of presence technology on workplace collaboration?

Updating Presence Often Results in Greater Productivity Boosts

Unsurprisingly, the primary key to using presence effectively is simply convincing employees to update their statuses more frequently. The chart below compares usage frequencies for various rich presence capabilities among employees who report a “moderate” or “significant” productivity boost with those among employees who see an insignificant productivity increase or a decrease.

Impact of Presence Functionality Usage on Employee Productivity Level

You can easily see that the workers who get the most mileage out of presence are those who keep their statuses up-to-date. While we asked respondents about a range of rich presence capabilities, we observed the greatest disparity in usage for custom status messages, group availability, device-based presence and location-based presence.

⇒ Custom messages. Employees who see significant productivity benefits from presence technology are 18 percent more likely to use custom messages to update their status than those who don’t see significant benefits.

⇒ Group availability. Workers whose productivity is boosted by presence technology are 23 percent more likely to update group availability information (e.g., for managers, IT help desk staff or call center teams) than those whose productivity isn’t improved.

⇒ Employee location. Employees who see productivity benefits from using presence are 14 percent more likely to update their location status than those who don’t see significant benefits.

⇒ Device used. Employees who significantly benefit from presence technology are 23 percent more likely to update device-based presence information than employees who don’t.

Despite these benefits, some employees may be hesitant to make extensive use of presence due to privacy concerns. If you’re trying to convince employees to adopt this technology in your organization, it’s best to focus on the kinds of functionality listed above, as these are most strongly linked with employees’ levels of workplace productivity.

“Depending on the kind of information, rich presence could be viewed as more intrusive,” Elliot explains. “For instance, if the system knows where you are, that’s a little bit of a privacy issue, so people need to be able to turn it on and off. Moreover, there has to be guidance about when you’re allowed to turn on and off certain kinds of presence information.”

Employees Frequently Receive Messages Unrelated to Work

One of the major drawbacks of the presence capabilities offered by “freemium” messaging clients, such as Skype and Google Hangouts, is that users can display their presence status to contacts both inside and outside of the workplace. To that end, we asked employees how often the messages they receive at work are actually job-related.

Frequency of Receiving Work-Related Messages

The above chart shows that 95 percent of our sample are using instant messaging for work-related purposes at least some of the time. However, it also reveals the disturbing fact that only 12 percent receive messages “always” or “often” related to work. This means the vast majority are frequently receiving messages that are irrelevant to their jobs during the workday.

Organizations can mitigate this drawback by avoiding freemium messaging clients in favor of the clients included in business phone systems. The unified communications (UC) clients that serve as the end-user interface for business VoIP solutions (you can view examples here) generally restrict presence information to contacts within the organization—eliminating the issue of employees chatting with friends, family and significant others.

Elliot notes that “most organizations don’t have acceptable use policies for presence in place” limiting the use of freemium messaging clients and outside communication. If you have a business phone system in place that includes presence functionality, consider implementing such a policy.

Remote Workers Are Less Diligent About Presence Updates

Presence functionality is crucial for remote workers, as it can indicate to managers and colleagues whether they’re currently working. However, we find that the remote workers in our sample are actually less careful about updating certain kinds of presence information than office workers.

The following chart displays the scenarios that prompt employees to update presence information. We’ve analyzed our sample to compare employees who primarily work in an office environment (three days per week or more) with employees who work remotely three or more days a week.

Situations When Presence Is Updated

The above chart reveals the fact that, at least in certain situations (such as meetings and lunch breaks), office workers are more likely to update their presence status than remote workers. In other situations, remote workers are only marginally more likely to update their status than office workers.

Since presence serves as a sort of “umbilical cord” connecting remote workers to the rest of the organization, we’d expect that remote workers would be proficient users of the technology.

However, the results of our survey suggest that remote workers may need explicit instructions concerning how often they should update their status, as well as the occasions for such updates. The lack of acceptable use policies regarding presence that Elliot notes may be to blame for the lax approach to presence updates.

Conclusions

The results of our survey suggest that adopters of presence technology should implement the following practices in order to maximize productivity benefits:

1. Encourage employees to use custom messages and keep device, location and group availability information up to date. Employees who see substantial productivity benefits from rich presence information are much more likely to update this type of information than employees who don’t.
2. Avoid freemium messaging clients and restrict presence information to organizational contacts. Our survey discovered that many employees are using messaging primarily, or even exclusively, for non-work-related purposes. By avoiding freemium messaging clients in favor of business phone systems that include messaging and presence applications, you can help alleviate this problem.
3. Define when remote workers need to update their status. We find that office workers are more likely than remote workers to update their status in common situations such as meetings and lunch breaks. By specifying when remote workers need to provide updates, you can encourage them to make more extensive use of a technology that connects them to the rest of your organization.

Learn More about PPIC Software Solutions.

“The future of BI tools lies in their security, adaptability and ease of integration across business organizations.”

– Rajiv Khanna – PPIC Software Solutions

The following article written by: Himanshu Sareen, Entrepreneur

When it comes to changes in the business-intelligence (BI) technology market, old giants of the enterprise software industry like SAP and Oracle aren’t leading the charge as you might expect. Instead, younger companies are the ones to watch when it comes to the most exciting business-intelligence software products that we’re seeing hit the market today.

Whether it’s Salesforce’s state-of the-art Analytics Cloud system; or the mobile POS solutions that we’ve seen from Revel Systems; or, from Tableau, BI software that delivers immaculate data reporting at the speed of real time, one thing is for certain: Monolithic systems are increasingly a thing of the past.

That means that newer, more adaptable BI tools (and the across-organization integration capabilities they offer) are going to become an increasingly large part of the way we communicate and do business.

In that spirit, I submit three BI trends that can benefit your business.

1. The rise of social intelligence

Businesses are becoming more and more customer-centric, and this is due in large part to the continual effect that social media has on how consumers behave. As a small business, you can’t be caught behind the curve in this regard. It’s no longer the case that businesses, large or small, can simply expect customers to buy products and services. Instead, current and potential customers also “participate” by writing blog posts, sharing reviews through sites like Facebook and Twitter and commenting on businesses through a multitude of other social networks.

In fact, social media platforms have given marketers an endless number of ways to connect with consumers and pick up on the different data trails that these networks create; and that’s key to creating engagement. However, it’s not enough to start a Facebook page or Twitter account and expect that simply because you’re on social media, your customers will come to you. Instead, businesses are now relying on advanced analytics technologies to help mine “big data” sources in order to learn more about their customers and gain insights about the different ways they prefer to communicate.

So, what exactly is social business intelligence? Essentially, it combines the traditional roles of BI software (building reports, dashboards, score cards, etc.), to track overall performance and shine a light on key performance indicators.

SBI then applies these results to analyze and deliver insights from social media. In other words, social business intelligence software is a tool that allows users to incorporate social networking, monitoring and analytics into a dashboard interface that offers clearer insights, which can lead to better ROI. This type of technology can be a windfall tool for small businesses especially, since small-to-medium-size businesses typically don’t have the budget to market outside of social media.

Still stuck on where to begin when it comes to implementing a social intelligence tool into your suite of BI software?

IBM’s Social Media Analytics Software as a service tool is particularly good at helping digital marketers segment campaigns and discover new sentiments that their constituencies are engaging with (see an overview here). The bottom line with social intelligence is that the smarter and more proactive you are when it comes to engaging with your customers, the more likely you are to improve your conversion rates.

2. The emergence of smart analytics

The end result of all BI software tools is to help end-users make more informed decisions. But if we can only be as informed as yesterday’s numbers allow us to be, how effective are our insights, really? With everything in business now moving at the speed of real time, the software we use to leverage insights must move faster. Whether a company wants to predict future trends, understand its customers better or help drive its strategic decision-making, smart analytics tools can use your old data to provide a treasure trove of new leads and new insights.

Chandni Vyas recently wrote about how the use of predictive analytics helped Cox Communications (the third largest cable entertainment and broadband provider in the United States) reduce customer turnover and increase customer conversions. Cox, Vyas wrote, used predictive analytics to identify business drivers for growth, then determine which customers to cultivate for new offerings.

Cox wanted to figure out why customers would choose the company and which ones would buy a particular product. The result was that the company was able to put more campaigns into the field.

While the ability to forecast analytic trends is still a new frontier for many companies, the technology is at our fingertips now; and that means that this is a tool your business should look into. Consider this video clip from Tableau, which shows how smart analytics tools can integrate into the way companies perceive data now.

The growth of increased threat intelligence

As a small business owner, you may not have outside threats, like malware and hacker attacks, top of mind. But when security giant Ciscoannounces a host of new cloud based security and analytics tools, you know that every other BI software vendor notices.

From what we’ve seen in the last few months, increased threat intelligence is a top concern among many industry leaders. IBM launched new threat analytics tools in the cloud back in April, and Microsoft followed up in May with its launch of Advanced Threat Analytics. Microsoft’s ATA platform in particular adds a fresh spin on threat analytics with a user interface that’s easy to use and able to give end-users a top-down overview of where threats are coming from.

Why is better threat intelligence important to your small business? Simply because you always need to be thinking ahead when it comes to leveraging technology that can make your business more reliable.

As with every other trend on this list, the ability to be more intuitive is important when it comes to analyzing where your company is vulnerable to attacks. What’s more, in an age where end-users typically use up to several devices across a variety of remote locations to access company resources, it’s no surprise that 76 percent of malicious attacks stem from compromised user credentials.

By implementing advanced BI threat analytics tools into your business’ security system, you’ll be better prepared to analyze attacks when they happen, instead of remaining vulnerable to blind spots that can spell big trouble.

Learn More about PPIC Software Solutions.