So I recently ended up weighing in on a LinkedIn Group on a topic having to do with social media appliances in the workplace. For what it’s worth (and realizing we aren’t showing you the full string of messages that preceded my post), here is a response I sent to a woman at a large biotechnology firm regarding the pros/cons of using a micro-blogging / instant messaging platform such as Yammer in the workplace:

“Hi Laraine,

All of our systems are cloud based. We don’t really have any interest in maintaining our own IT infrastructure — it’s too costly and frankly is a distraction from our core business. Cloud-based services, such as yammer, are very inexpensive, highly scalable, and easy/fast to deploy. They also allow us to keep an IT staff of essentially zero and employ an almost entirely variable cost / very low fixed cost business model. We are very nimble.

Yammers in our organization are ideal — they hit our people no matter where they are (like, say, at a beach) via SMS, instant msging, e-mail, iphone app, and on the yammer website… all potentially simultaneously (depending upon notification settings) = no place to hide, and no excuses for slow response time.

You can only Yammer within your organization unless you specifically set up a sub-group for parties outside of your e-mail domain names. Frankly, I would think a service like Yammer would absolutely crush anything a corporate tried to develop internally. Yammer has every incentive to provide the very best solution possible, innovate, and provide a high level of service. I guess it could be true that they have no particular obligations to their customers, unless, of course, they want to be in business a year from now.

I would agree with the comment above, that Yammer is about communication (not project management) — hitting people when, where, and how they like with concise, “need-to-know” only messages. It’s about getting all of the superfluous crap out of internal messaging. Goldman Sachs is famous for it’s internal phone message policies: no pleasantries, essential information only. Yammer forces this thinking upon users. If you’re looking for project management or collaboration, try basecamp et al or a free wiki service (google has a wiki platform that is super easy to use).

Finally, and it’s clear I’m a bit on a rant this evening, I feel pretty strongly that this country needs a very heavy dose of innovation if we are going to survive and thrive amidst the onslaught of innovation occurring in emerging economies with better demographics and the type of work ethic that originally got this country where it is today. Old ways of thinking are not going to drive ROIC / ROE / EVA going forward. Embracing radical changes in the way we think about business just might, however, give us a fighting chance.

Cheers,

Brad Heitmann
Founder & CEO
Granada Advisors”