INX Blog

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.

What's Collaboration Done for You Lately?

With the economy challenging proof that every technology investment will produce identifiable business value, it's nice to know that collaboration and conferencing are looking at a 25% compound growth rate over the next five years (according to analyst Blair Pleasant).

This excerpt from her post brings the value point home:

"Of course, for collaboration technologies to succeed, they have to be used in ways that make good business sense. In the past, many of the companies that implemented video technology, for example, were unhappy with the results. Some thought that it would be important to simply be able to see someone’s face while interacting with them. “Talking heads” as they’re known isn’t the best use of video technology. Instead, companies are getting tremendous value from using video and collaboration for training, technical support, document sharing, and other use cases. The key is not to use technology for technology sake, but to reach a specific business outcome."

So let's take a look at how some of these value scenarios play out:

• Training & Learning
  You have students/employees that need to learn about subject matter, but you don't have an expert "in house." With video conferencing, you can present the material, incorporate real-time questions and feedback and get the job done quickly, without travel expenses or difficult logistics coordination.
  
  Because your investment in training will produce the best results when retained over the long-term, you can record and post the course for on-demand access to allow people to update and hone their skills as time goes on and memories dim. By adding other course materials around the video recording and even interactive work spaces for discussion and document sharing, the course can provide ongoing value for new and existing employees or students, as needed.


• Technical Support
  One of the best scenarios to easily illustrate the case for using collaboration effectively for technical support was featured in our last blog post. Take a look at the short video and you'll be inspired by the potential for how support teams can work together, escalating issues as needed to provide faster resolution and better customer experiences.


• Document Sharing
  If you've ever worked on a project team, you know what it's like to try and determine which document is the latest version that incorporates all the updates from across the team. Now, you can use collaborative work spaces to share documents, hold editing until the person working on the doc returns it to the space and make sure everyone can find the latest materials related to the project. Keeping everyone on the same page is critical to bringing in projects on time and on budget.

When you think about collaboration and video conferencing, the combination of tools available enables you to centralize and share knowledge in a variety of ways that helps your company empower the expertise of your people.

What other ways are you using collaboration and video conferencing to bring value to your company?

If we can help you build a value scenario for your company's needs, let us know.

With the economy challenging proof that every technology investment will produce identifiable business value, it's nice to know that collaboration and conferencing are looking at a 25% compound growth rate over the next five years (according to analyst Blair Pleasant).

This excerpt from her post brings the value point home:

"Of course, for collaboration technologies to succeed, they have to be used in ways that make good business sense. In the past, many of the companies that implemented video technology, for example, were unhappy with the results. Some thought that it would be important to simply be able to see someone’s face while interacting with them. “Talking heads” as they’re known isn’t the best use of video technology. Instead, companies are getting tremendous value from using video and collaboration for training, technical support, document sharing, and other use cases. The key is not to use technology for technology sake, but to reach a specific business outcome."

So let's take a look at how some of these value scenarios play out:

• Training & Learning
  You have students/employees that need to learn about subject matter, but you don't have an expert "in house." With video conferencing, you can present the material, incorporate real-time questions and feedback and get the job done quickly, without travel expenses or difficult logistics coordination.
  
  Because your investment in training will produce the best results when retained over the long-term, you can record and post the course for on-demand access to allow people to update and hone their skills as time goes on and memories dim. By adding other course materials around the video recording and even interactive work spaces for discussion and document sharing, the course can provide ongoing value for new and existing employees or students, as needed.


• Technical Support
  One of the best scenarios to easily illustrate the case for using collaboration effectively for technical support was featured in our last blog post. Take a look at the short video and you'll be inspired by the potential for how support teams can work together, escalating issues as needed to provide faster resolution and better customer experiences.


• Document Sharing
  If you've ever worked on a project team, you know what it's like to try and determine which document is the latest version that incorporates all the updates from across the team. Now, you can use collaborative work spaces to share documents, hold editing until the person working on the doc returns it to the space and make sure everyone can find the latest materials related to the project. Keeping everyone on the same page is critical to bringing in projects on time and on budget.

When you think about collaboration and video conferencing, the combination of tools available enables you to centralize and share knowledge in a variety of ways that helps your company empower the expertise of your people.

What other ways are you using collaboration and video conferencing to bring value to your company?

If we can help you build a value scenario for your company's needs, let us know.