Following the Trends of Enterprise Collaboration
Every enterprise, size notwithstanding, has its own teams and groups that specialize in specific knowledge areas. And generally such specialized knowledge remains within the particular team or group and is not shared with the other elements of the enterprise. Typically what transpires is that such teams find it difficult to share their knowledge simply because managing such knowledge sharing can be quite an issue. Enterprise collaboration can actually aid in solving such issues. According to a Forrester definition, “any enterprise collaboration strategy is a carefully engineered plan focused on the use of collaboration platforms and tools to solve business problems by optimizing interaction among people. It is tightly aligned with high-level business strategy and closely tied to specific enterprise initiatives (e.g., knowledge management, communities of practice).”
Achieving successful technology transformation and enterprise collaboration are the best ways to bring in increased revenues and enhanced profits for any enterprise. It also helps enterprises to deal with emerging business requirements easily. Following are a few trends that were majorly responsible for ushering in and popularizing the concept of enterprise collaboration:
- Global economic recession: While enterprises globally were reeling from the after-effects of the recession, they were busy looking for ways to reduce collaboration expenses and optimally utilize their resources. Thus the slowdown brought in a renewed effort amongst enterprises to indulge in an organized approach that would enable enterprise collaboration to occur in a professional manner and bring down costs.
- Sorting out information issues: The information explosion has become part and parcel of all our lives, and there can be no denying its importance. But while information brings in numerous benefits, it also comes with its own problems, problems that enterprise should be able to quickly identify and sort.
- Dealing with multi-country issues: Globalization ushered in an era of opening up of markets globally. Therefore enterprises were dealing with numerous issues that may be endemic to a particular region or country only. Such complex issues also had to be sorted and therefore enterprises looked at enterprise collaboration solutions to help deal with such complications.
Actually attaining the benefits of enterprise collaboration can happen only when enterprises face these challenges head on. Some obstacles may emerge out of certain issues relating to responding in real-time – sometimes it may be because the enterprise itself may be overtly dependent on data, and other times there may be problems because of the usage of archaic communication and collaboration tools. With such shortcomings, locating important data may be cumbersome, and sharing it may definitely be difficult. Therefore it is necessary to understand enterprise collaboration methods and tools to understand what can work for the enterprise.