6 Benefits of an Enterprise Collaboration Strategy
The pace of business continues to accelerate, thanks in part to a mobile workforce and constantly connected customers. Competition is getting more intense. Providing a product or service immediately, effectively and efficiently is essential.
If you want to avoid being left behind, you can’t wait for a response to an email when something needs to be done. By the time you get in touch with the person you need, your competition will be three steps ahead of you.
There are many tools available today that can facilitate communication across your organization, including chat, instant messaging, video conferencing and web-based collaboration. However, simply implementing one or more of these tools will not improve business processes, speed decision-making or enhance customer service. To maximize the value of these tools, you need an enterprise collaboration strategy that enables productive engagement and interaction with employees, managers, partners and customers.
Business Benefits
A comprehensive enterprise collaboration strategy delivers six key business benefits:
- Drives optimal productivity and performance. Collaboration enables the free flow of knowledge, data and best practices. Employees are more in tune with each other — and their customers — which helps them do a better job. Without collaboration, a great deal of employee knowledge remains untapped and most likely wasted.
- Reduces travel costs and enables remote work. Virtual team spaces reduce the need for face-to-face meetings, allowing organizations to drastically reduce travel, lodging and related expenses. These spaces also enable remote and hybrid work styles, enabling organizations to tap into a national or even global talent pool.
- Brings together distributed teams. If you have more than one location or employees who work remotely, a collaboration strategy makes interactions seamless and productive. Two or more heads are often better than one, even if each is in a different place.
- Makes users more “available.” Sometimes, people cannot speak by phone but can collaborate via text or chat. A multi-channel collaboration strategy can make this possible.
- Provides the flexibility and agility of a small business. Collaboration removes the red tape and bureaucracy that can hamper internal and external communication. By streamlining business processes, organizations can also reduce operational costs and accelerate the sales process.
- Gets tasks completed faster. Is there anything more frustrating than discovering that you’re doing the same job as someone else, or waiting on an approval that has already been given? Collaboration helps coordinate tasks, eliminate duplication, consolidate sequential steps and ensure everyone is on the same page.
The best collaboration tools offer accessible communication channels, document management, secure connections, and streamlined project tracking.
Supporting Your Enterprise Collaboration Strategy
To support your enterprise collaboration strategy, you need a solution with the following capabilities:
- Provides easy access to multiple communication channels
- Enables teams to create, share and manage documents
- Securely connects people in multiple organizations
- Makes it easy to track project status and responsibilities
Your collaboration strategy should be shaped not only by your organization’s business requirements but also by the needs and work styles of your staff. Most organizations have multiple generations of workers who communicate and collaborate differently. Organizations must embrace those different forms of communication in their collaboration platform.
Many organizations have implemented collaboration tools on the fly, with individual departments and teams using different solutions. Users must switch among various tools depending on how they want to communicate and with whom. Organizations are unable to realize the benefits of a collaboration strategy.
Transform Your Communications with GDS Unified Communications Platform
Global Data Systems provides a cloud-based unified communications solution that gives users access to everything they need within one interface. Users can easily switch among voice, chat and meeting spaces, improving productivity and making it simple to share information. The solution is highly flexible and scalable and backed by world-class management and support.
Today’s enterprise has no borders. Let GDS help you develop an enterprise collaboration strategy and support it with our hosted unified communications platform.
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