Member Article

Bdaily goes behind the business with Moxie Software

Tom Kelly, President and CEO of enterprise social software company Moxie Software, educates companies on how to leverage social enterprise software to improve collaboration and drive innovation and customer engagement.

What key challenges has your company recently faced?

When you look at how people all over the world are connecting socially through online networks, you realise that we need to allow enterprises to connect in the same way, to gather knowledge internally and push out to where it is needed, to drive speed of response and productivity. Organisations face the challenge of understanding the benefits that social collaboration brings to them. There are those who seek to block the deployment of social enterprise software by raising the question – what’s the return on investment? They are essentially asking – what is the ROI for communication? For engagement? For driving innovation? So addressing that question and getting enterprises to think differently is an important ongoing challenge, but one that we relish. We show them case studies – one example is TEVA Pharmaceuticals, who have reduced manufacturing cycle time by 40% as a result of using Moxie’s Employee Spaces to report and quickly resolve manufacturing issues. That is a very powerful message.

What is your biggest achievement over the past 12 months?

Moxie Software works to answer to the challenge of harnessing the growth of mass digital and social engagement. This year we added key social media and mobile capabilities to our Spaces by Moxie product suite. We are proud of these updates as we can clearly see the impact our technology has for customers, and how it helps them became more effective in solving critical issues. Different from any previous product update, Moxie is taking a holistic, balanced approach that aims to break the barriers between employee and customer collaboration, the two pillars of our product suite.

What is your biggest focus for the coming year?

The biggest focus will be to continue driving value in the enterprise social software market by incorporating new technologies that allow our customers to be innovative and even more effective in their business.

If you had to choose one top piece of advice for someone just starting out in business, or is currently operating within your industry sector, what would it be?

One of the great challenges of a CEO is to get your organisation to move with speed and stay agile, especially as it grows and spreads out geographically. My advice would be to stay connected and closely listen and communicate with employees and customers. This may not be physically possible when a company is spread around world, but it can be made a reality through digital means. I microblog constantly, for example, and blog regularly. It is important to take a deep dive to see what people are doing, to get to know their specific areas of talent. I use our product, Employee Spaces, to get updated in real time on projects, accounts and teams.

Can you share with us your view of the current landscape of business, in this region or generally and where your organisation sits within it?

The trend of driving collaboration around content through social engagement will grow in relevance. The key question I see to be addressed is: How do you connect people who create the content and drag that content to where it is productive?

Where Moxie Software sits is in providing a social workspace, and allowing unstructured data to be aggregated into searchable format that is meaningful to enterprises. Employee Spaces lets people work in groups and see specific content that can be helpful to their jobs. Enterprises need new ways for teams to share knowledge and for individuals to reveal passions and expertise, to accelerate innovation within the organisation. We combine the best of social networking tools, search capabilities and Web 2.0 technologies with the security and scalability required by enterprises to bring people to knowledge fast, allowing organisations to innovate faster.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Tom Keighley .