ACHIEVING CORPORATE GOALS WITH COLLABORATION SOFTWARE AN IN DEPTH APPROACH TO COLLABORATION
Whitepaper
SUMMARY This paper examines the current challenges related to reporting, communicating, forecasting and budgeting that most companies face and how can an automated collaboration system help them achieve their strategic goals. A technology with such extensive effect demands an in depth analysis approach. The capability to plan, budget and estimate properly is a necessary aspect of business success and demands clear exposure over essential financial and operational information. However, several enterprises continue to be dependent by completely wrong processes and outdated methods, generating a difficult environment. In order to streamline and optimize business processes, companies increasingly see the need to become more flexible to their needs of information, its availability and accessibility for knowledgeworkers (employees who work with data). Any information system needs to be flexible enough to ensure efficient collaboration and communication at each level of a company. Collaboration technologies bring significant performance improvements in today’s business landscape, presenting a new dimension of productivity, real-time collaboration, information-sharing, and team management.
THE BASICS OF COLLABORATION SOFTWARE Collaboration systems are developed for one basic purpose, to facilitate communication and teamwork among the staff members of a company. A collaboration system allows people to share their ideas and information with other colleagues so that a task is executed efficiently and effectively. For more than 20 years, collaboration and work have almost always meant the same thing. Innovation is one of the most valuable activities in organizations, which derives from ideas owed to collaboration. Easier, faster and securely collaboration can generate: Increased employee productivity Improved cross-functional connections Sales cycle reduction Direct connections not only with experts, but also with staff members and colleagues with a common target Faster problem resolution Minimized latency and ineffectiveness in organization processes Projects traceability and management Improved decision making
Building a sense of social community Reduced travel costs This type of technology systems has a beneficial impact over the organizational changes. It has great effects on how the company is conducted, how people within the company communicate and how decisions are made. With the help of a collaboration system, the members of a company can work together in spite of their geographical area. In this context, e-professionals use a collaborative working environment to offer and share data and exchange ideas in order to achieve a common understanding. Such techniques make it possible for an efficient and productive cooperation among several competencies. A collaborative working program is an organizational system that emerges any time when collaboration usually takes place, whether or not it is formal or informal, deliberate or random. Collaborative work systems are those in which conscious efforts have been made to generate strategies, guidelines, and structures in order to institutionalize values, actions, and procedures that encourage cooperation among various parties in a company in order to accomplish organizational objectives.
THE STATE OF COLLABORATION SOFTWARE IMPLEMENTATION Companies are continuing to make investments in a range of collaboration technologies. While most providers guarantee that these systems can solve a large variety of problems, most users claim that collaboration tools mostly help them save money on travel, but not in their business processes. However, in order to realize the benefits of collaborative software in the business processes, the users have to take full advantage of these tools and integrate them into product development and workflows. According to a report released by Forrester Research related to the state of collaboration software implementations states that most companies, no matter their sizes, don’t know how to achieve real business values from this kind of adoptions. This is worrying; especially 64% of those surveyed say they’re seeing between zero to four benefits. 62 percent of the IT executives and technology decision-makers surveyed said that the main benefit they get from a collaboration system is lower travel costs, and 58 percent stated that a collaborative system is helping them communicate quicker and easier. According to Forrester, 42 percent of employees work outside the company. Because of this, employing collaboration software is needed. The main reasons for implementing collaboration tools include: Video-conferencing Instant messaging
Web conferencing Room-based video-conferencing Unified communications Web 2.0 tools On-premise emails Team workspaces
RECOMMENDATIONS Companies will need to do an initial analysis before implementing any collaboration tools. They will need to understand what is the net benefit of these tools and if it does worth adopting them. In order to ensure a quick and seamless implementation, a thorough plan and testing (small pilot group, interviews, etc.) definitely needs to be done. 1. Understand how employees currently do their work. Before choosing and implementing collaboration tools companies must find out what are the current issues or challenges that employees face. Are there communication problems, can projects be managed more efficiently? These are some examples of questions that managers will need to ask employees and find answers as well. 2. Identify issues that collaboration tools can solve The issues revealed after interviewing employees can be split into four categories. Ones that collaboration tools can resolve, those that are cultural, ones that need internal processes changed and others that are a combination of the above. The recommendation is for companies to focus on the problems that can be resolved by collaboration solutions. 3. Focus on the workplace related issues After the employees are surveyed multiple issues can be revealed. The risk is that companies will choose to resolve them all by implementing multiple collaborations tools. The recommendation is to focus on four or five problems and choose the best tool that addresses those issues so that organizations maximize the benefit. 4. Organize training sessions with employees The good result of the implementation relies upon on the adoption of the tools. Companies will have to organize workshops so that employees are used with the new tools. Changes are not always easy so organizations will need to find methods to motivate employees in using the tools. Also they need to find good ways to measure the effectiveness of the new collaboration tools.
CONCLUSION Rolling out a collaboration platform it’s not an easy task for a company. This requires several prerequisites besides the technology related ones and actually there is no single plan for success because each organization is different. What this means is that employees should start to enhance their collaboration skills before the company starts implementing the tools. Although buying collaboration software won’t make the organization more collaborative, this doesn’t mean that technology doesn’t help a lot in effective collaboration. Technologies that enable real time communication between employees based in different sites that allow for almost instant sharing of relevant information to the public or open dialogue inside communities, play a big role in the success of a company. The key in these very competitive times is to have a collaboration oriented culture among employees, before implementing the tools, so that the technology really fits the style already developed.
ABOUT IT GREEN LIGHT
IT Green Light is an IT consultancy company, focusing mainly on special IT projects and technologies. Headquartered in Romania, the company develops IT projects worldwide through its offices in Munich and Dubai. For over 10 years, IT Green Light designs and implements collaboration solutions, business intelligence, corporate intelligence and knowledge management solutions.
Contact details: Address: 28, Cameliei Street, Bucharest, District 1 E-Mail: office@glit.ro office@itgreenlight.ro Web: www.itgreenlight.com