Collaboration technology enables leaner, more innovative
businesses
After the focus during the first two or three years of this
decade being squarely on how to cut costs and reduce overheads, the
past few years have seen organisations keen to reinvent themselves
as stronger, more effective and more innovative on top of this
slimline model, writes Angela Ashenden, principal analyst at
Macehiter Ward-Dutton.
The view of the "team", which traditionally took a hierarchical,
stove-piped perspective on the organisation, with each functional
area acting largely autonomously to deliver its respective
objectives, is evolving into a more horizontal perspective. Here
groups of people from across the organisation come together to
share their knowledge and experience to develop new and innovative
ideas and opportunities.
In "lean" organisations, individuals are likely to work on
multiple projects at once, with different groups of people. At the
same time, teams are more transient certain people may only be
involved for a short time, and they need to be brought up to speed
quickly, contribute their input, share their knowledge and move
on.
The improved communication network that a
collaborative working environment creates can enable an
organisation to make better use of its resources, facilitating
reuse of work done elsewhere within the organisation. This might
mean reducing duplication of effort where the output of a project
or task can be exploited elsewhere, or building upon previous work
in a new project.
Collaboration technologies can also reduce an organisation's
overheads. For example, integrated instant messaging in a
CRM application can reduce phone call costs, and
videoconferencing capabilities used for a team meeting may mean
travel cost and time savings where participants are widely
distributed.
By providing different methods of communication to suit
different situations, and combining voice-based communication with
desktop or device-based applications, such as application sharing
or whiteboarding, technology can enable collaborative working in a
distributed environment that enables people to achieve almost as
much as if they were in the same room.
The collaboration software market is made up of suppliers of
many sizes and from many different backgrounds. Whether one
alternative is better than another depends entirely on your
specific requirements. However, the ease with which these offerings
can be implemented together and integrated to deliver a seamless
experience should influence your selection.
The greatest obstacle to implementing a seamless collaborative
environment is the limited availability, maturity and use of
standards to support the integration, interoperability, and sharing
of data between the various services.