Our everyday business life is changing. Remember sales people with rolodexes that helped you to find right contacts? I’m sure some of my friends in sales are still using them. But, be honest, how many times for the last week you checked LinkedIn to get information about company or person? According to published statistics, LinkedIn has 107 million users in United States and 97 million unique visitors every month. LinkedIn is a great source of information to find right people.
Here is an interesting news – LinkedIn Built Its New App to Replace Your Office Directory. I found it interesting. Until now office directories were part of IT stack in every company. It usually stuck between email service and abbreviation like LDAP. It was mixed and messed up with you contact lists on your multiple devices and never worked properly (at least for me).
The following passage from the article explains the problem.
“Most companies have some crappy directory service that either they’ve created themselves or they’re [paying for],” said Ankit Gupta, project lead for Lookup. “People don’t really update their internal profiles. People don’t even add a photo. So they’re actually turning to LinkedIn [already].”
You could already do this sort of searching within the main LinkedIn app, but it required a little more strategy with filters and search terms. Gupta says that people check out their colleagues’ profiles more than you’d think — when searching for people on LinkedIn, users click on a colleague’s profile about 30 percent of the time. This app is intended to simplify that search and keep it company-specific, he added.
There are a lot of tools already out there that serve a similar purpose, including Slack, which is benefiting from Silicon Valley’s propensity for sky-high valuations. Facebook is testing a business offering, too. Gupta says he doesn’t see this product as a competitor to those because Lookup is more of a directory than a communication service. (My guess is that LinkedIn may one day change its mind.)
It made me think about how companies developing social networking, communication and collaboration software are getting to the point where their functions will become operation critical for every company. Think about directory of suppliers and contract manufacturers. You may think about it as a bunch of business card in a rolodex of your “supply chain” manager. You can also think about it as a list of vendors in your ERP system. But, at the same time, you can think about it as a list of companies with contact information on LinkedIn. This is where things can get interesting, because it will have a potential to redefine boundaries of enterprise software functions.
LinkedIn might not be a software to manage contract manufacturers tomorrow. But it provides a valuable set of information that can be used and “linked” to other applications. Remember my “PLM: from sync to link” article last year? Here is the thing. In a networked era, we can stop thinking about how to get all information in our own proprietary system. We can start using existing systems and rely on other sources of information – a real paradigm shift in the way we operate.
What is my conclusion? Traditional enterprise software created silos of information. For years, vendors tried to protect the information in each and every silo- it gave them a protection from competitors tried to eat a bigger slice of enterprise software pie. The real change is coming with systems that are operating globally as a network. LinkedIn is a good example. People and companies are connected using LinkedIn. This information is valuable and can be linked and reused by other systems. Are we ready for such a significant change? I’m not sure, but it feels like the direction business will take tomorrow. Just my thoughts…
Best, Oleg
picture credit [Re/code] article.
