Sparqlight Bets Social Workflow Beats 'Social Voyeurism'Sparqlight Bets Social Workflow Beats 'Social Voyeurism'

Enterprise Social Networks: A Guided Tour

DataStax CEO Matt Pfeil has tinkered with enterprise social networking and business process management tools without falling in love with either. But he is a big fan of Sparqlight and its social software for getting work done.

Despite all the alternatives available for workflow and project management, what workers typically do is "hack the crap out of their calendar" and assign tasks by passing around emails, Pfeil said. Sparqlight is the first tool he has found that is both better and simpler than those kludges.

As enterprise social networking tries to break into the mainstream, players like Jive Software and Yammer are tripping over themselves to prove that their systems boost productivity and streamline work processes. Sparqlight has partnered with Yammer as well as Google for single sign-on and for integrating some of their collaboration features, but Sparqlight makes the case that the emphasis needs to be less on the social and more on the enterprise and the work it needs to do.

[ In the current workplace, effective collaboration tools are more essential than ever. Read more at Collaborative Innovation Not Optional In Today's Economy. ]

Enterprise social networks "are not focused on getting work done--they're more about what I call social voyeurism," Sparqlight chief marketing officer Michael Weir said. "What we're doing is taking social and wrapping it around tasks you do every day and making them assignable, taggable, trackable, and measurable," he explained. "Those tasks can then be strung together to create an improvisational workflow." Tasks that don't require human intervention can also be automated through the tool.

Sparqlight is officially launching its product Wednesday, after previewing it at South by Southwest in April. Weir and CEO Brian Reisgen provided an overview in an interview last week.

The Sparqlight user interface borrows social software conventions like an activity stream and notifications from your contacts, but it is more tightly structured around assigning tasks and recording progress against them. Entering a task is a little like typing a status message, but with deadlines attached and task-centric super tags, such as #CB for close-of-business, or #CQ for close-of-quarter. It uses standard @ references for tagging other people.

That's nowhere near as structured as a traditional enterprise workflow or business process management tool, but removing some of the formality is kind of the point, Weir said. "Today's improvisational workflows don't fit that model."

DataStax's Pfeil agreed. Sparqlight is "social" in the sense of being an easy-to-use Web application "where it's really easy to interoperate with anyone in any organization," he said. "Ninety-nine percent of the time that's going to be another employee, but I could also just start sending you some things I need from you." That ability to stretch the workflow to include outsiders comes in handy when coordinating with a contractor, for example, or with a public relations agency.

In contrast, Pfeil said he had tried Yammer while in a previous role at Rackspace and found that by itself, it wasn't that useful. (Rackspace later switched to Salesforce.com's Chatter as its official enterprise social network.)

"At Rackspace they were big on Yammer, and I used it but I didn't like it. I felt like it got in the way too much. Maybe that's my inner Steve Jobs coming out there--I feel like tools should get the job done but should not make it difficult," Pfeil said. Rackspace also offered access to and training with several enterprise workflow and BPM tools, he said, "but I felt like there was so much work needed to make them work that it wasn't worth it."

DataStax is a commercial open-source company that backs Apache Cassandra, a NOSQL database used for high-performance Web applications. With about 50 employees, DataStax is venture capital-backed and growing rapidly, so it has had to establish the kind of rigorous processes that win enterprise customers and keep them happy, Pfeil said. A typical process managed through the tool would be bringing a new customer on board, where half a dozen tasks might be assigned to people in engineering, training, accounting, and other functions.

Sparqlight makes initiating any given process about as easy as sending an email. "Actually, [it's] a little bit easier," Pfeil said. "With an email, if I want something done I have to hit compose, type all the instructions, and hit send. Sparqlight has a nice option where at the end of creating a task [I] can save a template for it, so the next time I can just change the name of the customer and don't have to type the whole thing up again."

Sparqlight's Reisgen said Yammer integration allows his tool to bring its task management strengths to the social software environment, with Sparqlight events showing up in the Yammer activity stream. He hopes to achieve deeper integration with Yammer over time. Integration with the Box cloud file-sharing service is also on the horizon, as is integration with another major cloud software company Reisgen will not yet mention.

"We really want to be going deeper into the systems of record side of the house, helping expose those systems of record to new users and helping enterprises get a lot more [return on investment] out of their original IT investment," Reisgen said. In fact, Sparqlight began as a spinoff of another business venture, The Enterprise University, and was created to fill a gap in existing enterprise software capabilities.

The new Sparqlight cloud-based collaboration with Google Docs and Yammer social networking integration is priced at $20 per month per enterprise user. Sparqlight is free for small to medium teams, and a free 30-day trial for up to 50 users is available for enterprise use.

A stream of Sparqlight tasks

Follow David F. Carr on Twitter @davidfcarr. The BrainYard is @thebyard and facebook.com/thebyard

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