Collaboration Helps Businesses Leverage Hidden Knowledge

Our companies have to keep pace with our market environments. We can no longer compete effectively if we're unable to locate and use our knowledge assets in innovative ways. Work is not a solitary endeavor. Ideas shared converge and generate new concepts not possible without harnessing a variety of perspectives.

Business success is based upon how information is shared and used. By providing our employees with the right information, at the right time, to make better decisions more efficiently, more opportunities for success exist. The crux of the matter is that this information often resides with your staff, partners and even your customers. It's not always located on your servers or within your systems.

This is why unified communications and collaboration are enabling the "new normal" for doing business. By our very nature, we're social animals. Just look at how fast social networking and Web 2.0 have become part of our daily experiences. The ability to "meet" and exchange ideas with people we'd never have the opportunity to otherwise communicate with has changed our perceptions and increased our desire to interact whenever we decide to participate.

We can't afford to sit on the sidelines because the expertise we need is across town or in a different time zone. People are the secret sauce for business execution. This said, processes and applications are the supporting cast that helps people bring our businesses to life in service of our markets.

Collaboration is people working together to achieve a common goal. Unified communications is the technology that enables that goal achievement - anytime, anywhere - which is the "new normal" businesses must achieve to find success.

A recent study conducted by Cisco found that 75% of 800 people asked say that work practices today are more collaborative than they were two years ago. The study also found that, "email and phone conferencing remain the most frequently used tools for collaboration. In addition, more than 75 percent use electronic calendaring and web conferencing, 68 percent use video conferencing, and about 40 percent use wikis and blogs."

Get a copy of the report here and start considering how you can improve the way you enable people to work together to drive your company's success.

Our companies have to keep pace with our market environments. We can no longer compete effectively if we're unable to locate and use our knowledge assets in innovative ways. Work is not a solitary endeavor. Ideas shared converge and generate new concepts not possible without harnessing a variety of perspectives.

Business success is based upon how information is shared and used. By providing our employees with the right information, at the right time, to make better decisions more efficiently, more opportunities for success exist. The crux of the matter is that this information often resides with your staff, partners and even your customers. It's not always located on your servers or within your systems.

This is why unified communications and collaboration are enabling the "new normal" for doing business. By our very nature, we're social animals. Just look at how fast social networking and Web 2.0 have become part of our daily experiences. The ability to "meet" and exchange ideas with people we'd never have the opportunity to otherwise communicate with has changed our perceptions and increased our desire to interact whenever we decide to participate.

We can't afford to sit on the sidelines because the expertise we need is across town or in a different time zone. People are the secret sauce for business execution. This said, processes and applications are the supporting cast that helps people bring our businesses to life in service of our markets.

Collaboration is people working together to achieve a common goal. Unified communications is the technology that enables that goal achievement - anytime, anywhere - which is the "new normal" businesses must achieve to find success.

A recent study conducted by Cisco found that 75% of 800 people asked say that work practices today are more collaborative than they were two years ago. The study also found that, "email and phone conferencing remain the most frequently used tools for collaboration. In addition, more than 75 percent use electronic calendaring and web conferencing, 68 percent use video conferencing, and about 40 percent use wikis and blogs."

Get a copy of the report here and start considering how you can improve the way you enable people to work together to drive your company's success.