Monday, December 12, 2011

All I want for Christmas is ERP and social media data integration

Seems like SAP is on the road to giving me exactly what I want for Christmas, starting with their own Social Media drill down tool:
SAP Invades Radian6 Territory with Social Media Drill-down Tool - ReadWriteCloud.

With SAP entering the fray of Social Media analytics, and already being so deeply embedded with so many customer's internal information (such as HR, Org Management, Customer Relationship Management and Sales and Distribution, to name only a few), can the integration of these two data sets be far behind?

As an internal communicator, this is what I've longed for for years - the ability to use employees' social media habits, both internally and externally, to engage and inform them better. Imagine being able to cross-check employee chatter trends, whether you're using Yammer, Lotus Connections, Microsoft Sharepoint or something else entirely, with organizational information. Is our business transformation seen as a positive effort in Finance but not in HR? Is our sales force frustrated by the implementation of our new mobile sales app? Are employees more satisfied in the UK than the US?

If SAP can track social media trends externally, I can't imagine it will be far off before they make integrating the same information internally that much easier. I envision a communications dashboard where I can analyze which trends are most common among whom in my enterprise, and use that information to target further communications. Perhaps the CEO needs to fly to Chicago to better explain, in person, why we're going forward with a particular project. Or maybe my CIO needs to communicate directly to our Directors and VPs to rally their support for our new strategy.

The more specificity I can get to who's saying what the better, and SAP, or any ERP for that matter, has the most accurate and up-to-date information about my enterprise.As a communications guy, my mouth waters at the possibilities. Can't wait to see where this goes.