Posted on by

With a history in social media, I’m now learning about social business which is improving substantially the productivity of my own work and my team.

The principle of working in context is a foundational principle to working smarter for a social business. This allows you to keep all your communication on a topic in one place which is a smarter way to work.

Features of a collaboration tool can facilitate working in context.

The lesson, Working in Context with Communities, Activities, Files and Wikis – Using IBM Connections, demonstrated the following features:

  1. Communities can be set up for a specific project or event.
  2. Experts can be searched throughout your network.
  3. Within the community you can invite co-workers and guests.
  4. Activities can be set up and todos assigned to members with scheduled delivery dates.
  5. Activities and files can be tagged for easy search.
  6. Wikis can be used for organizing information that all members are contributing to.
  7. Conversations using comments can be held in context about the task, files and shared information.
  8. Files can be linked to and bookmarks added in the context of the todos.
  9. File versioning and comments exists for files and wiki pages.
  10. Members can be easily mentioned for quick notification.

By using a collaboration platform where you can work in context, you are able to create an environment, and community within your organization that allows everyone to know what is going on all the time. This can be transformational for your business.

My team used to spend too much time in the day trying to find information and resending instructions that used to be sent by email. Tasks used to get missed. With everything in one place, our daily routine is much more productive and I’m finding the quality of work better.

There are many positive outcomes that results from working in context with the right tools:

  1. Information can be found quickly and easily.
  2. The structure of the conversation can be seen in one place.
  3. The amount of noise is reduced substantially.
  4. Teams can get through projects more easily and work smarter
  5. Better collaboration better leads to more depth and quality in work.
  6. Better decisions can be made and the quality of work is improved.
  7. Workflow is streamlined and time is saved.