Cape Town, 31 Oct 2011
Software and IT services company, Alacrity, is proud to announce the commercial launch of its latest incubation venture, Wysetalk, a social media platform developed for the enterprise.
Throughout the world, social media is still experiencing rapid growth; it's no surprise that Gartner has placed it as one of its top four trends for the next year.
However, it's in the enterprise environment that it still lacks in influence and application. “Companies still prevent employees from making use of social media tools in the workplace for fear of distraction, lack of control, potential disclosure of trade secrets or corporate espionage, and bandwidth abuse, to name a few reasons or excuses,” comments Stuart Phillips, Chairman of Alacrity and Wysetalk Product Owner.
“All of these stem from a lack of understanding and failure to apply good communication principles with an understanding of technology, privacy settings and the need to engage with an employee base that stretches across a much broader generation spectrum.”
Wysetalk considers all these aspects and it goes further. In addition to facilitating appropriate company discussions, the system also integrates seamlessly with existing bespoke company systems like the operations, billing, MIS, customer data and manufacturing systems. This integration enables Wysetalk to trigger discussions based on certain events that take place in the system, for example, a customer support query, a manufacturing issue, a financial target reached. It then encourages the right people to comment on and get involved in the discussion in a public or private forum.
The only thing social about Wysetalk is the format of dialogue it applies that makes it more familiar and easy to use, improving the overall adoption rate. Wysetalk works from a top down and bottom up approach to ensure the communication objectives of the company as a whole are met; management are able to set the tone and agenda for the types of conversations that take place, set up the appropriate work and discussion groups, and set privacy limits, while staff are able to comment and engage in discussions that are pertinent to their function within the organisation.
The creation of Wysetalk reads like a typical entrepreneurial IT story, home-grown in South Africa. “We were in the midst of discussions with a client to develop a software solution for them, and afterwards in brainstorming the solution, someone said 'wouldn't it be great if... ',” comments Gerhard Pretorius, Alacrity Director and creator of Wysetalk. “Being the enterprising techie I am, by the end of the weekend I had developed the foundations of the Wysetalk system and since then a specialised team of developers and commercial experts have worked tirelessly to fine-tune the product. Although a number of companies have tried to apply the social media platform to an enterprise environment with limited success, our key differentiator and the reason for our high customer adoption rate is the value of external system triggers being able to facilitate the business contextual conversation.”
More information on the product is available on the Wysetalk Web site - www.wysetalk.com.