paragyte Whitepaper The Case for Collaboration In Enterprise

Transcription

1 Whitepaper The Case for Collaboration In Enterprise

2 The Collaboration Context Globalization has changed the business landscape drastically over the past decade and it continues to challenge organizations to keep up with the changing times. Globalization alters the perspective of all aspects of businesses, from partners, to suppliers, to clients, to supply chains, to technology and labor. It has impacted business and financial markets in such a notable way that experts are still trying to measure its implication on political, financial, and economic volatility. Apart from opening up a whole new world of opportunities, globalization has also introduced destructive forces in terms of rise in competition, price wars and diminishing profit margins associated with it. To add to that they need to manage dispersed teams, cross cultural communication challenges and timezone differences. The last decade has seen high degree of economic volatility. Cost pressures have challenged businesses to make dramatic course corrections to maintain a healthy bottomline. Outsourcing has been at the core of enterprise strategy to cuts costs on repeatable processes and focus on their core competencies. For some industries, outsourcing has been the deciding factor between staying in business and going bust. Without robust program management and communication strategy, outsourcing could lead to disastrous results. These challenges have led to creation of a burgeoning market for collaboration platforms. Enterprises are now leveraging the power of cloud computing, faster internet speeds and SaaS platforms to make their tams more productive and effective. Collaboration enables community development within an organization, allows employees to learn from each other and brings teams, stakeholders and customers on one single platform, all working towards agreed business objectives. 1

3 Collaboration 2.0 The concept of collaboration has been around for years. People have been collaborating using traditional communication channels such as phone, , meetings, faxes etc. But communication alone is not enough in many scenarios. Organizations dealing with multiple projects, departments, and skillsets tend to stick to a traditional combination of hierarchy and process control. This can lead to a culture of short term vision and a disgruntled workforce that has no alignment to the business objectives. When dealing with cross cultural, multi location workforce, there is a strong need to empower employees, foster innovation and encourage healthy communication across the hierarchy. Moreover traditional collaboration solutions don t cater to the global, mobile, and connected workforce s needs and expectations. The advent of social networking has revolutionized collaboration in a big way. Collaboration tools such as Wiki, Social intranet, Forums, Blogging, Instant messaging have brought much needed personalization and multi-dimensional communication avenues to collaboration in enterprises. This has been further complimented by the rise of cloud computing and the SaaS model. These new generation of collaboration tools are easier to setup, learn and use and integrate well with organizational disciplines such as project management and quality control. The biggest plus side of using new wave collaboration systems is its ability to generate, propagate and store knowledge. It brings a great deal of objectivity to the way work gets done and empowers people to contribute to the bigger picture. Collaboration systems will prove to be effective only if they are able to blur the line between real and virtual. The combination of mobility, cloud and social is the key to making collaboration work for enterprises. 2

4 Social collaboration software sales are set to grow by more than 40% a year until The global market for 'enterprise social software' was worth just $0.9 billion in 2011, but IDC predicts this will rise to $4.5 billion over the next five years. 3

5 Collaboration Technologies Trends show that enterprises prefer easy to use SaaS tools that adapt easily to their business environment. These tools are typically cloudbased, device agnostic with advanced social capabilities. While documents traditionally dominate enterprise collaboration, the new crop of tools enables discussions, meetings, video conferencing and much more. Software providers provide the entire gamut from enterprise social networks (ESNs), to content or document management system with social features, and/or an intranet/portal platform. Most of them offer a range of capabilities while some focus on specific areas. Provide real-time text, voice, and video communication. Document Management Collaborative Project management Communication channels - Discussions, meetings, idea sharing. Co-creation through group participation. Source: ZDNet Microsoft Sharepoint is one of the most popular collaboration and information management tools, with social networking features, Web 2.0 capabilities and third-party apps and plug-ins. SharePoint enables idea sharing, document management, publishing, and information management. With social networking tools such as My Sites and content technologies such as blogs, wikis, and RSS, SharePoint makes enterprise collaboration a whole lot easier. 4

6 Paragyte Capability As a Microsoft Certified Partner, Paragyte provides end-to-end collaboration solutions for both the Intranet and the Internet solutions based on WSS and MOSS. We have developed significant expertise in SP UI Designing 2010 helping us provide solutions that are in rich in user experience and aesthetics. The Paragyte Edge Leverage customization expertise to create solutions that adapt to the business environment Technical knowhow, understanding of industry domain and consultative approach Focus on delivering ROI, not just technology Case Study Industry: Insurance and Reinsurance Services Customer Global specialty provider of insurance and reinsurance with over 700 employees in United Kingdom, Singapore, Switzerland and the United States and is is publicly traded on the NYSE. They have grown to about $8.5 billion in assets and $2.8 billion in shareholders equity. Situation The customer wanted to revamp their intranet, document management and customer facing portal applications to keep up with evolving regulatory and business requirements. The project timelines demanded rapid development and very aggressive support SLA s for down and recovery time. Solution In addition to developing their customer facing application in SharePoint, the Paragyte team successfully integrated Share Point portal with their legacy applications. Paragyte also built a business critical reporting mechanism using SSRS for meeting their business and regulatory requirements. The team ensured end-to-end high availability and disaster recovery to meet their SLA requirements. Using agile approach helped them roll out enhancement and fixes every two weeks sprint cycle. Benefits Secure, stable, and scalable application infrastructure. On Demand Reporting System. Regulatory and business compliant. Minimized business interruption using off-hours support. Rapid and efficient IT implementation. Savings of approximately 50% in IT spending. 5

7 Collaboration-a must have McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) finds that twice as much potential value lies in using social tools to enhance communications, knowledge sharing, and collaboration within and across enterprises. MGI's estimates suggest that by fully implementing social technologies, companies have an opportunity to raise the productivity of interaction workers high-skill knowledge workers, including managers and professionals by 20 to 25 percent. Adoption of collaboration tools in enterprises is still less than 30% and while that can be viewed as alarming, collaboration software providers are bullish about the prospects. With so much focus on operational efficiency, enterprises will look to join the collaboration bandwagon sooner than later. Emerging workplace trends like BYOD, mobility and remote working will further fuel the need for collaboration platforms; they will not just be good to have but a must have for organizations to function optimally. 6

8 Making collaboration work Although enterprise social collaboration products have been around for a while now, only 12 percent of information workers have access to enterprise social collaboration software, and only 8 percent of them use it at least once a week, according to a recently published report by Forrester. As with any enterprise software implementation, the ROI depends on level of adoption. This is more to do with organizational culture and its alignment to business objectives. Organizations need to develop a clear collaboration strategy, one that covers all bases the right software, a robust learning & development ecosystem and culture development through HR practices. Some of the key factors for collaboration to succeed are: 1. Executive buy-in The importance of collaboration should be an executive level agenda and senior management needs to be involved in building adoption and sustaining adherence. The seriousness needs to then cascade down to next levels. This will encourage employees across levels and geographies get aligned to the vision and make it part of their professional objectives. Research suggests that while employees don't get to observe senior executives in the company, their perceived behavior makes a lot of impact on co-operation by next levels in the hierarchy. 2. Encouraging behavior Driving positive behavior towards adoption and adherence is the most crucial step in making any enterprise wide software initiative successful. It is important for employees to see the benefits of collaboration first hand, for them to adopt it. HR needs to focus on recognizing and rewarding adherence behaviour. A good case in point is sales organizations making CRM adoption part of their compensation policy. 3. Good governance Social collaboration, without supervision could easily turn into distraction for employees. That is the opposite of being productive, thereby defeating the very purpose. Managers need to act as moderators and ensure that these platforms are being used effectively for achieving the desired objectives, especially with the social component of collaboration. A data oriented mindset will help managers keep tab on key usage metrics and make decisions accordingly. 4. Build collaborative culture At the heart of it, a collaboration platform is a communication engine with a prominent social component. Social technologies will work only if they are part of the workflow, not as something to do every day. This means organizations will need to develop and implement workflows that embed collaboration into the processes, thereby activating tools from day one. A robust learning program also would be necessary to ensure creation of knowledge and expertise. 7

9 Conclusion It is more than evident that collaboration is going to be a significant component of the future enterprise workplace. Like any other enterprise wide software, collaboration also comes with its set of issues. With executive buy-in, robust processes and a healthy focus on culture, it could well turn out to be a game changing investment for enterprises. About Paragyte Paragyte provides innovative solutions in a wide range of technologies and domains, to various small and large organizations. We strive to provide solutions that increase our clients' efficiency, reduce costs and maximize their return on investment. With a team of skilled and enthusiastic technical experts, who are ever-eager to better themselves in the quality of services they provide, we have turned challenges into opportunities for many of our customers and helped them yield significant results through their partnership with us. To know more about Paragyte, visit References: Forbes, Computer World, CIO.com, Gartner, Forrester, Microsoft Research, IDC, Ipsos, United States New York 77 Water Street, 8th Floor New York, NY Ph: Seattle NE 8th Street, #207 Bellevue, WA Ph: India Pune R&D Center 1 201, World Trade Centre Pune, Ph: Pune R&D Center 2 7 Kemps, Road 13 Kalyani Nagar, Pune, Ph: contact@paragyte.com 2015 Paragyte Technologies 8