Adopting an Inshore Model for Effective Enterprise Collaboration
Although offshoring service operations are a great way to save costs and work well for some software companies, it is quite challenging to align organizational goals with process understanding. The idea is to prioritize and outsource those services that can be beneficial to the company. In spite of these giant leaps in outsourcing, only eight percent of technology service organizations are highly effective and aligned with their business.
Using the “Inshoring Model” concept, these challenges and gaps can be overcome. It is an effective, efficient and integrated service delivery alternative. The need today is simpler collaboration among colleagues, partners, and customers while driving cost efficiencies, and the Inshore Model meets that need.
What is Enterprise Collaboration?
Collaboration is about people cooperating on a broad continuum of content creation, sharing and information management without being restricted by time zones or geography. Social networking and collaboration are becoming an inherent part of end-user computing with web 2.0 technologies. The driving force behind this is the use of social networking and collaborative tools, like blogs, RSS, wikis, etc., in individuals’ day to day and business applications. To achieve the full benefit of collaboration, organizations cannot afford to deploy these collaborative tools in an ad hoc manner.
Collaboration Challenges
Organizations often need to overcome a number of challenges in order to achieve the benefits of collaboration. Today most businesses use a silo-based approach to collaboration, with each business entity using an assortment of collaboration tools and platforms that fail to unlock important data within individuals’ files or hard drives. Another roadblock can be failure of specialized knowledge bases within individual departments, which are often buried in legacy point solutions, to be shared with other groups across the enterprise. Typically, employees get the vast majority of their relevant information directly from other people within the organization, not from corporate bulletins or e-mail.
This impedes the collaboration needed to meet fast-changing business needs. Collaborative business also adds to the problem with the need for employees to share information with partners, customers and at times with colleagues who are distributed across geographies in today’s globalized world.
Collaboration in Social Networking – Web2.0, the New Buzz
Web 2.0 provides a comprehensive set of collaborative communication and social networking services on a single platform that was built from scratch to be secure, fully integrated and scalable.
a) Each end user is in the loop, ensuring that knowledge workers remain apprised of upcoming meetings, project status, each others’ whereabouts, and any new material posted to a team or shared folder.
b) Streamline the flow of information across complex processes, ensuring that end users work efficiently both as a team and on their own.
c) Social search, content tagging, social profile enhancements
d) Enhances productivity in the enterprise, including the need to access data from various databases
e) Enhances the user interface and related back-office elements for easier personalization and collaboration
f) More effectively capture and manage intellectual capital
g) User generated content and discovery enablement
h) Supports the reuse of information assets
Conclusion
An enterprise collaboration strategy needs to be focused on the use of collaboration tools to solve business problems by optimizing interaction across the enterprise, increasing people productivity for process effectiveness and efficiency and accelerating decision-making for faster time-to-market.
With the right enterprise collaboration solution, group productivity and organizational effectiveness can be dramatically increased and decision cycle times greatly reduced.
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