In the global marketplace, businesses are publishing and consuming vast amounts of information. In fact, IDC predicts that by 2020 all the data created by consumers and businesses on earth will be 44 times larger than it was in 2009.
This emerging, decentralized business landscape calls out for collaboration. In an age of instant expectations, meaningful collaboration can mean the difference between success and failure. Businesses increasingly consider collaboration essential to their success, according to a recent global survey of C-level executive and IT decision makers conducted by Kelton Research. More than 80% of those surveyed agreed that enterprise-wide collaboration is more important than individual specialization for success.
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People who discover, share and increase the value of that information put their businesses ahead of their competitors. Such information has the power to accelerate innovation, move products to market more quickly and enable employees to collaborate and share information where and when they need to do so.
In that same survey, 75 of the companies said they expect more use of collaboration tools in the next year. Today’s business realities are requiring companies to radically change the way they operate on a global scale. Communications and collaboration tools are empowering companies to collaborate and share information faster and more seamlessly while also reducing costs.
Key benefits include:
* Lower costs
* Higher productivity
* Greater flexibility
* Faster time-to-market
* Improved employee retention
* Improved customer service
The collaboration challenge
While there are real business benefits to greater collaboration, C-level executives and IT decision makers also report a dark side to collaboration technologies. The survey revealed that employees may, in fact, be passing the buck on certain responsibilities because of readily available collaboration options. More than one in three execs agree that people problem-solve less on their own today and instead rely on collaboration to ask other people for help. In the United States, that number jumps even higher to more than half of respondents.
This decline in individual problem-solving could also be the result of workload sharing and better decision making in today’s enterprise. Collaborative behaviors evolve over time. They yield improvements as both the technology and the human behaviors permeate the business. Measuring applications misses the point. What should matter most to organizations is the effect of these changes over an extended period of time and how they help impact business outcomes to bring about company improvements.
Before companies consider collaboration as a solution to meeting business objectives, they need to understand its use within the context of the business. Why? Because collaboration involves people and technology. Understanding both the technical and behavioral aspects enables organizations to identify and strategically address their current pain points. It also helps them measure and tune the result of the solutions they deploy.Businesses need to determine what they want to solve before they discuss the features or functions. There are several consistent patterns involving how collaborative technologies impact the business:
1. People finding and communicating with others (corporate or team-based communication).
2. People locating and acting on relevant job-related data (decision making).
3. People executing tasks together (project collaboration)
4. People consuming, refining and qualifying information (innovation).
It can’t be understated: success takes place when an organization considers the people, the process and the technology requirements at the outset. They all feed on each other. Projects that focus on just the implementation of the process, or only the technology, often fail. Successful engagements result from a careful examination of each.
Sprenger is the global solutions director for information management at Avanade. He defines and directs the implementation of Avanade’s solution strategy relative to Microsoft’s collaboration, information management and business intelligence products and alliances, including the creation of intellectual property and reusable implementation assets that accelerate customer deployment. Markus joined Avanade in 2005, and has more than 10 years of experience in designing and delivering Microsoft-based BI solutions.
