@ Lotusphere Innovation Lab: "Deriving Social Insight from Legacy Business Applications"

A business application doesn’t need to be "officially" social to contribute social insights. Companies have always been social and the only difference is that we now have software that supports and simplifies the process of communicating and collaborating, and explicitly codifies the information derived from those interactions. If we look at the definition of social analytics “the process of measuring, analyzing and interpreting the results of interactions and associations among people, concepts, and facts” and apply this more broadly to the business, then a couple of things happen. Firstly we start to be able to harvest actionable social insights from existing enterprise applications, secondly we create a bridge that allows us to marry legacy business solutions with the new generation of social business platform, and thirdly we significantly increase the ROI we can realize from our social investment.

In this demonstration we will examine how we can we apply social analytics to a legacy business application which is not a “social application” per sei. We will demonstrate how these applications hide a rich set of social and semantic links within their underlying schemas, relationships that may be well hidden and distributed across a myriad of tables and cells, but they are there nonetheless and can be represented as a socio-semantic graph on which social analytics can be easily applied. We will then concretely show how this approach can be applied to support the sales process through providing recommendations for how to most effectively close a sales opportunity - from finding experts to identifying similar opportunities and assets that will maximize for success.