Creating an Integrated Collaboration Experience
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Most businesses today support collaborative processes with the most primitive of tools, including email, IM and SMS, but is that enough to be effective? No. The complexity of human interaction requires much more interaction than these tools can support. As a result, important decisions and critical information are often waiting for the right place and the right time to be shared.
The evolution of communication is triggered in part by younger generations entering the workforce who are creating demands about how they would prefer information to be shared. This requires previous generations to conform, which often creates internal resistance to adoption, and can create disparate, multi-vendor tools in place that don't have any synergy.
Sure, most businesses like yours probably understand that collaboration needs to focus on bring people together, wherever they are, but they’re challenged with how do this cost-effectively while providing scale, security, and accessibility. This is where we see employees struggling the most when speaking to their leadership; connecting the dots between processes and tangible business impact.
Think about it. As the range of technologies continues to broaden in collaboration, the list of challenges and complexities are only going to continue to sprawl too. What makes this worse is that these challenges are typically in silos so they go unnoticed for a short time, but eventually they start to culminate together, which becomes so unmanageable that these processes begin to actually hurt the business. This doesn’t look favorably upon the people managing these processes either. Let me show you what I’m talking about.
- Unified Communications, businesses have multiple pipes that carry all communications, which creates a network that costs more, is more complex to manage, and isn’t capable of driving significant collaborative innovations. Users then have to wait longer for communications applications, reducing productivity and impacting business processes.
- Contact Centers, businesses are unable to enhance customer satisfaction and contain the costs associated with them. This is because they don’t know what the right solutions is that can provide significant multi-channel contact center and self-service capabilities. Without this, they are struggling to streamline the workflow between front and back office applications. Customer loyalty is hugely impacted when they aren’t able to provide better answers and increased self-service, which also increases costs significantly.
- Video & Telepresence, what businesses are overlooking is how live interaction is a critical part of business. Without the nuances of expressions, inflections, and body language, businesses are missing critical components of communication, which affects decision-making.
- Mobility, most businesses lack a secure infrastructure creating a hard, unreliable, and unsafe way for people to connect to each other or to different applications, anywhere and anytime.
To address the challenges above, companies need to start focusing on moving from delivering individual applications to creating and integrated collaboration experiences. The transformational convergence of these disparate systems into a unified technology environment creates a singular process. The result is enhanced and expedited delivery of information to the people who run businesses, but also the customers who rely on them. The benefits of creating a collaborative business are substantial: from accelerated time to market, to lowered costs, to environmental control. This gives IT a unique opportunity to empower people to connect and work together anywhere, and reach new levels of productivity and innovation.
Speaking of wireless technology, as mobility increasingly drives more business communications, the proliferation of smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices, it also fundamentally changes how employees interact with each other, customers, and business partners. Presidio estimates that more than 50 billion things will be connected to the Internet by 2020. Yet today, more than 98 percent of things in the physical world remain unconnected. The growth and convergence of processes, data, and “things” on the Internet will make networked connections more relevant and valuable than ever before, creating unprecedented opportunities for industries and businesses.
This paradigm shift comes with major ramifications for IT:
- Employees now demand Bring-Your-Own Device environments—with access to corporate applications from their own mobile devices.
- Forces IT to now manage multiple complex mobility components including device tracking, RFID business intelligence and RF Environments.
- While meeting the growing demands of wireless users, IT must also ensure performance and compliance.
- Anywhere, anytime connectivity is taken for granted as a guarantee.
But perhaps the biggest challenge with all this is security. Given the nature of wireless technology, with its unrestricted walls and doors, protecting corporate assets requires advanced technologies that keep data safe, but also give end users enough flexibility to perform their jobs.
Security threats, along with the high total cost of ownership and functionality limitations, have inhibited many enterprises from adopting mobile technologies. But what if you’re able to break down those barriers by offering a range of secure, high-performing wireless solutions that increase employee productivity and efficiency. Having this capability allows businesses to integrate best-of-breed mobile technologies to create an integrated collaboration strategy.
Presidio is solving these challenges. Our experience as a leader in security, inter-networking, optical, voice, Internet of Things (IoT), and managed services makes us ideally suited for enterprise-wide, industry-leading, collaboration deployments. These solutions give businesses competitive advantages and provide employees with the freedom and flexibility they demand.
Contact Matt Rutter at [email protected] for more information on creating a personalized collaboration road map.
Matt Rutter is an Account Manager at Presidio supporting Northeast Ohio.
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