A collaborative enterprise is an organisation that knows how to quickly combine the capabilities and knowledge of diverse workers into a unified support structure. As customers demand a more unified and immersive experience from the brands they work with, today’s enterprises need a unified workforce if they want to preserve brand reputation and achieve business goals.
Enterprise collaboration helps employees to share information in real-time, solve business problems, and improve customer satisfaction. The question is, how can enterprises build a business case for collaboration that helps them to harness the benefits, and avoid any potential risks?
Step 1: Know the Benefits of Collaboration
The first step in building any successful business case is understanding the return on investment that a transformation can bring. Collaboration tools in the enterprise don’t just give employees a way to connect beyond their desk phone and email account, they can also:
- Connect your knowledge base: In an enterprise, different specialists often exist in siloed segments around the organisation. Collaboration breaks down the walls so that sales can connect with marketing, and finance can connect with customer acquisition groups. When everyone can work together, the whole enterprise runs more smoothly
- Engage consumers and derive insight: When team members can collaborate over support solutions for an end-customer they can create more engaging and satisfying experiences for users. In a world that thrives on customer experiences (CX), collaboration could be the key to making your enterprise stand out
- Increased productivity: Collaboration tools in the enterprise mean that employees can access support and guidance quickly in the workplace. This keeps all of your staff focused on crucial tasks and reduces productivity gaps
Step 2: Know How your Team Wants to Collaborate
A successful business case for team collaboration doesn’t just highlight the potential outcomes of implementing new tools. It also addresses which resources need to be embraced, by drawing attention to specific use cases within the enterprise environment. After all, the key to success with any IT strategy is adoption. Finding out exactly how your team wants to collaborate ensures that you invest in the right systems. For instance:
- Do your enterprise employees prefer instant messaging to email?
- Is there a need for meeting and conference room systems to collaborate with people outside of the business?
- Is video conferencing essential, or do your workers prefer audio?
- When deploying your collaboration strategy, do you want to maintain some of the existing technology (Desk phones and IP endpoints) in your infrastructure?
- Do you need an on-premise, hybrid, or cloud strategy?
Step 3: Plan Your Roll Out
Once you know the benefits of collaboration for your enterprise environment, and exactly which tools you need to implement to get the best results, you can start to consider how you’ll roll your new resources out to your team.
In a large enterprise environment, it’s important to remember that different groups may require different collaboration services. For instance, it’s unlikely that your sales team will need a video conferencing system to help them collaborate with other workers, but your supervisors might need video to help them connect with remote and flexible workers.
To improve your chances of success, it’s often a good idea to introduce collaboration strategies to one portion of your enterprise at a time. Not only does this reduce the pressure on your IT teams, but it also gives you a chance to discover any potential problems that need to be fixed before you introduce your new collaboration strategy to the rest of the business.
While the pressure of a digitally-transforming (DX) marketplace can tempt you to rush your rollout, remember that slow and steady can still win the race.
