Critical Factors for Deploying Real-Time Collaboration

Critical Success Factors for
Deploying Real-Time Collaboration



an Osterman Research white paper sponsored by

Osterman Research, Inc. . P.O. Box 1058 . Black Diamond, Washington 98010-1058 Phone: +1 253 630 5839 . Fax: +1 866 842 3274 . info@ostermanresearch.com . www.ostermanresearch.com Critical Success Factors for Deploying Real-Time Collaboration
Why You Should Read This White Paper 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 Collaboration failure to apply these technologies successfully will result in a technologies are competitive disadvantage. In short, whatever decision you very useful as a make with regard to collaboration technology will result in a means of making users and entire change to your business. organizations more efficient. Traditional information-sharing processes are becoming Coupling these more expensive and more difficult: travel to facilitiate in-capabilities with person collaboration is becoming more expensive; presence acquisitions and mergers are creating organizations with provides more geographically distributed workforces; labor expenses dramatically continue to climb, making user productivity more critical; greater value by competitive pressures are forcing companies to provide allowing ad hoc better and faster customer support or face the risk of losing meetings to occur more customers. quickly and more often than with Collaboration technologies that allow users to share traditional information, make presentations, conduct or receive training collaboration and communicate in a variety of other ways are important tools. 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.
© 2005 Osterman Research, Inc. Page 1 Critical Success Factors for Deploying Real-Time Collaboration
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 One of the keys collaboration technology is understanding the corporate to successful culture of the environment in which the technology is to be deployment and used. A corporate culture in which information-sharing is not use of a encouraged and rewarded might be able to benefit from collaboration capability is collaboration technology to some extent, but it will not understanding realize most of its advantages. Conversely, a corporate the corporate culture in which information-sharing is the norm will realize culture of the the greatest benefits from collaboration technologies. This is environment in simply because collaboration and the technologies that which enable it are about sharing information and streamlining collaboration is business processes with the ultimate goal of improving the to be used. bottom line. In the absence of such a free flow of inf... [download for more]