Workers respond well to user experiences that replicate what they are used to in their personal lives with social media, mobile communications, video chat, text messaging and email.
Stamford, Conn.-based research firm Gartner has predicted that half of large organizations by 2016 “will have internal Facebook-like social networks, and that 30 percent of these will be considered as essential as email and telephones are today.” Unfortunately, it noted that “80 percent of social business efforts will not achieve the intended benefits due to inadequate leadership” and an “overemphasis on technology” rather than user experience.
In a report on “unified communication and collaboration” (UCC), another research firm, Frost & Sullivan, pointed out that employees have become accustomed in recent years to “the simple and user-friendly interfaces of free online communications tools, such as Gmail and Facebook, which allow them to collaborate in only a few clicks.”
Enterprise communication tools have been lagging in user experience, on the other hand, said the Mountain View, Calif.-based consultancy, as they are still “more process-oriented than people-oriented, making these solutions less appealing for end users, increasing training durations and lengthening adaptation times.”
Some of the longest-standing implementations of collaboration technologies have occurred in the context of R&D and innovation. In 2006, IBM began organizing enterprise-wide “Innovation Jams” by employing electronic collaboration tools to pull in innovative ideas from hundreds of thousands of employees across the globe.
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German manufacturing firm Siemens ran similar Innovation Jams starting in 2009, modeled on IBM’s effort. These virtual events brought together employees from across the company to discuss and solve piracy issues in Siemens’ business. After receiving a positive response to the project, Siemens built a large-scale collaboration system call TechnoWeb, which uses social-media tools to allow geographically dispersed employees to locate expertise within the company and seek answers to questions or get help in solving problems.
Cloud-based services now make these kinds of solutions available and affordable for small and medium-size enterprises, as well as large companies, enabling social media collaboration with a focus on B2B communication.
Tim Banting, principal analyst for collaboration and communications at Washington, D.C.-based research firm Current Analysis, told Tech Trends Journal that he sees two principal trends in the use of collaboration technologies. “One is real-time communication across the Internet,” not just by text, but also by voice and video,” Banting noted. “The other one is enterprise social networking across the digital supply chain, without having to exchange emails all the time. It’s saving a lot of time and money and making people feel they are one community across the supply chain.”
John Parkinson, affiliate partner at Chicago-based Waterstone Management Group, an advisory firm focused on serving the technology sector, agrees that industrial firms can benefit from better supply chain communication through these collaboration technologies.
“Letting suppliers chat with each other about what is working and what isn’t, about capacity shortfalls, or about product revisions coming out, it opens up communication around the product life-cycle management piece of the supply chain,” Parkinson told Tech Trends Journal. “The manufacturer needs to know where their inventory is, how to ramp up volume, how to cycle product revisions through the supply chain. Now you have the opportunity to deploy a platform that makes all that a lot more efficient.”
This article was originally published on ThomasNet News Industry Market Trends and is reprinted in its entirety with permission from Thomas Industrial Network. For more stories like this please visit Industry Market Trends.