By Tim Young, founder of Socialcast and vice president, Social Enterprise for VMware
Over 80% of the US workforce works in offices managing information, yet they rely on tools and systems that automate the metaphors of the pre-digital workplace. At a time when our economy desperately needs a productivity revolution, we need to fundamentally change the way we manage and coordinate information. As we enter the Post-PC era, VMware is committed to building new platforms and experiences that will dramatically evolve the way we work.
Today, VMware and Socialcast are announcing a product that will do just that–Strides. Strides is a lightweight social application that allows managers and employees to coordinate work efforts together in real time. It’s a simple tool that blends the principles of enterprise social networking with efficient task management.
It’s our belief that most enterprise social software is lacking in the area of definitive planning. Through conversations with key customers, inter-disciplinary research focused on understanding what makes work rewarding, and self-reflection upon how we ourselves work and what could be improved, we realized there was an opportunity to provide structured experiences built on top of a social layer. Strides was born as a result of identifying three primary pain points that today’s businesses face related to coordinating work efforts.
Business Agility. Managers and employees don't always focus on, or prioritize the right work to drive business outcomes.
- Need: Allow managers to coach and align employees on business priorities to accomplish company objectives.
- Need: Empower employees to choose projects to work on that are important to their team and company.
Employee Engagement. Employees are disconnected from company goals, not having visibility into why their work matters. As a result, they are not actively engaged with their work.
- Need: Provide employees with a way to connect their work to company objectives, engaging them as a team racing towards the same goal.
“Work about work.” Managers and employees attend too many meetings focused on reviewing project status, or discussing urgent escalations of the day.
- Need: A way to share conversation around specific business objectives, allowing for collaborative decision making as new developments unfold in real time.
It was with these challenges in mind that we set out to create a tool that would allow teams to have conversations around work objects and activities, provide managers and employees with a way to manage their attention and indicate priorities, and move from confusion around a complex set of corporate goals to clarity about which tasks each person needs to focus on and by when.
Strides offers a fundamentally different way of using software to manage work. It is a fresh approach to getting things done, which we believe is more in tune with how people actually work (or at least would like to work) on a daily basis. Strides leverages Socialcast’s activity stream engine and represents a pragmatic evolution of enterprise social networking. Strides aligns big picture goals with specific challenges and leverages a team member’s social graph and identity while contributing to tasks and projects. Companies and managers will be able to assign meaning and context to each task giving employees a view into the importance of what they’re working on. Strides helps teams work better together.
Experience this new way to work for yourself. We invite you to join a limited private beta of Strides by visiting http://www.strides.do and signing up. We know this will change the way that you work.
