Collaboration for the Enterprise

Emerging out of a backdrop of a severe economic downturn in the United States, IT leaders in enterprises are looking to maximize productivity and reduce costs. In addition, collaboration across silos is one of the key business lubricants that have become mission critical in the current environment for impacting innovation and unlocking value with areas such as social networking and CRM.

Enterprises recognize the need to leverage the skills and talents of their key resources; they are fast discovering the positive impact that collaboration tools have on the strategic goals of an organization with unencumbered interaction between groups of people, with content and information.

Challenges of Global Markets

With most large companies investing in emerging markets in search of growth, businesses are either trying to squeeze new processes into existing tools or choosing stand-alone solutions on disparate platforms and technologies to aid collaboration. While these solutions may serve the requirement at the moment of need, it may not be the best solution to adopt.Without a holistic perspective, productivity may be challenged affecting the performance and compliance for regulated industries.

Organizations need to apply forethought into understanding the evolution of work groups and predict the collaboration needs accordingly. This will preempt a mature collaboration framework which can help meet the organization objectives of boosting productivity and enabling innovation.

Collaboration Maturity Model

Enterprises need to evaluate their current deployment of knowledge management tools for information workers for effectiveness and empowerment. While it is fairly reasonable to expect intranet deployments, it is clear that most organizations take a very fragmented, departmental view and not a platform view towards making information actionable.

Organizations can benefit from a single collaboration platform such as SharePoint by:

• Rapidly respond to business needs
• Proactive platform management
• Enable scale agility – mirroring rapidly changing business needs
• Cost efficiency by accomplishing more with existing resources
• Unified collaboration with cutting costs and reducing complexity