Chatter: Collaborative Panacea or Hidden Warning?

Imagine for a moment that you are the lead manager of an important project in the IT department of a multi-million dollar firm. Your chain of communication is complex and branched: project assistants report directly to your ten team members, who in turn report directly to you. The team members are from a multitude of departments in the company, and you are tasked with devising a method that will ensure a smooth flow of information between the various branches of your team. Your success with the project will be determined largely by the effectiveness of communication between assistants, team members, and managers.



Enter “Chatter,” a social networking site designed by Salesforce and tailored exclusively for the workplace. Modeled with the template of other popular social networking sites like Facebook, Chatter allows for convenient collaboration between the components of a company in a private, secure manner. It incorporates features like status updates (letting people know if you’re currently available or not), project group capability (allowing members of a group project to communicate through a central information cloud), sharing documents and other types of information, automatic notifications about any update to any document, and a Twitter-esque functionality for another form of instant communication.



To circumvent the obstacles encountered with universal ERP’s, among them limited customization opportunity, Chatter is offered as a platform with unlimited potential for customization through the release of over 100,000 “apps” akin in a business context to those offered by Apple. Company developers also retain the option to create and implement their own enterprise applications.



Due to the pervasive nature of social networking in this day and age, I am not surprised to see its utility in the business arena. Chatter offers benefits that will no doubt reduce cost and increase efficiency for any company, but what about potential hidden, intangible costs? Could this mark the decline of civility and personal interaction in the workplace? We have seen it happen in the social arena; many people would prefer to “post” on a friend’s wall rather than calling or having a conversation in person. Beyond the social arena, global business meetings are now often held over video conference systems; this eliminates travel cost and saves company time, but it also eliminates the opportunity to impart a strong impression to a potential business associate through a warm smile, firm handshake, and courteous, face-to-face discourse and negotiation.

With the advent of business social networking systems like Chatter, is there really any need to leave one’s office? Sure, productivity may skyrocket, and the nuances of personal interaction may hold less importance than to which I ascribe them, but it seems like technological advances in this direction may one day even eliminate the need for an office building. Perhaps this is not a terrible consequence, and perhaps technology will not one day replace all conventional, personal forms of communication, but deep in the algorithms of Chatter's foundation is surely hidden a caveat for the future of social interaction.