Enterprise Collaboration – Merging Business with Social Context

In a previous article we focused on the drive for business agility through implementation of communications-enabled business processes. Such processes are adaptive, bringing the right set of collaboration elements to the user in a manner sensitive to business context. But where and how does social context enter into the quest for business agility?

The fact is that our communication and collaboration activities are mediated by a set of social rules. The more intimately we attempt to communicate meaning, the more visual our communication needs to be. Psychologists have known for decades (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1967) that up to 55 percent of the total information transferred during a conversation comes from non-verbal communications and cues.

Bottom line – a video-centric collaboration platform facilitating real-time communications connecting people, communities, and information to make faster business decisions is warranted. Virtual teams and communities quickly can share ideas through blogs and wikis; schedule meetings and enable IM, voice, and video communication; manage and share documents; and take advantage of micro-blogging, RSS feeds, rating, and tagging to work more efficiently. With this in mind, CIOs need to build a foundation to support those applications.

Several key questions to ask are:

Would you be communicating visually with suppliers, customers, partners or anyone outside of your organization?

What quality of experience do users expect: HD video and audio, traditional conference style, Web cams?

How many sites will be connected in one meeting?

How many people will participate in each type of meeting, in each location?

How will video be integrated with other UC tools (IM, scheduling applications, IP phones, 3G mobile phones and existing video systems)?

What sequence of activities is needed to build the necessary collaborative capabilities considering organization culture, processes and IT infrastructure?

Deploying the technology is only one part of the process. Strategic, company-wide implementation requires close attention to cultural and procedural changes throughout an organization. Without such behavioral and procedural initiatives, new collaborative technologies will offer only limited benefits, but if carried out well, implementation of these new technologies has the potential to transform an organization and bring exceptional new operational efficiencies and business opportunities. IT

David Yedwab is a founding partner in Market Strategy and Analytics Partners (News - Alert) LLC (www.mktstrategy-analytics.com).

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