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Collaboration ? the sharing of information and ideas ? is a critical business process that is becoming more critical in an era of tighter profit margins and increased competition. The ability to make information-sharing processes easier, more effective and more efficient creates benefits for any organization, including speeding its product time-to-market, improving its customer support, streamlining internal communications, reducing expenses and making users more productive. New collaboration technologies make it possible to gain a competitive advantage relative to those that don't take advantage of these capabilities, but a failure to apply these technologies successfully will result in a competitive disadvantage. In short, whatever decision you make with regard to collaboration technology will result in a change to your business.
Traditional information-sharing processes are becoming more expensive and more difficult: travel to facilitiate inperson collaboration is becoming more expensive; acquisitions and mergers are creating organizations with more geographically distributed workforces; labor expenses continue to climb, making user productivity more critical; competitive pressures are forcing companies to provide better and faster customer support or face the risk of losing customers.
Collaboration technologies that allow users to share information, make presentations, conduct or receive training and communicate in a variety of other ways are important capabilities that make users and entire organizations more efficient. Coupling these capabilities with presence ? the ability to see when colleagues are available in real time ? provides dramatically greater value by allowing ad hoc meetings to occur more quickly and more often than with traditional collaboration tools. Adding presence capabilities to collaboration ? making real-time collaboration possible ? make the system that much more valuable.
This white paper discusses the key considerations in deploying and managing a collaboration system. This document also briefly discusses the collaboration offerings and capabilities provided by SiteScape.
What Does it Take to Implement Real-Time Collaboration Successfully?
Presence-enabled collaboration tools can provide enormous benefits to an organization if they are implemented properly and in harmony with whatever constraints may exist. This section discusses critical success factors for deploying and using collaboration to its full advantage.
Understand Your Business Culture
One of the keys to successful deployment and use of any collaboration technology is understanding the corporate culture of the environment in which the technology is to be used. A corporate culture in which information-sharing is not encouraged and rewarded might be able to benefit from collaboration technology to some extent, but it will not realize most of its advantages. Conversely, a corporate culture in which information-sharing is the norm will realize the greatest benefits from collaboration technologies. This is simply because collaboration and the technologies that enable it are about sharing information and streamlining business processes with the ultimate goal of improving the bottom line. In the absence of such a free flow of information, no collaboration technology ? even one that allows collaboration in real time ? will provide much benefit.
Understand Your Business Processes
It is important to understand how information is shared within an organization and the role that collaboration plays in getting things done. An organization that uses physical meetings extensively to discuss ideas, brainstorm and to share information will benefit more from a collaboration infrastructure than one in which employees seldom meet.
Workflows within an organization are also key to understanding the benefits of collaboration. Structured workflows for key processes, such as product development or customer support, will definitely benefit from the use of collaboration technologies. Because many collaboration technologies and tools can replace paper-based or even more traditional electronic workflows, they can reduce the amount of time required for key processes to occur and can reduce costs substantially.
The use of presence-enabled, real time collaboration can provide even greater value to an organization by allowing workflows to be enhanced based on the availability of the individuals involved in the process. For example, let's say a sales manager receives a customer inquiry for which she needs information from someone in the accounts payable department. Instead of leaving voicemails or emails to one or more people in the accounts payable department, a presence-enabled collaboration system would allow the product manager to determine who was currently available in that department that could respond to the inquiry.
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