If you are like me and follow all the latest trends in the ICT industry, you have probably read a lot about collaboration recently – and more specifically how collaboration tools are transforming – and will continue to transform – the ways we work.
At enterprise level, this shift is having dramatic and wide-ranging results. Industry research shows that the adoption of enterprise social collaboration solutions both increases productivity and decreases spending – the type of double benefit that all organizations look for when investing money in new ICT solutions.
The changing nature of the end-user
One of the core reasons for this shift to collaboration tools at enterprise level is the fundamental change in how we as individuals use technology in our personal lives. We utilize social apps every day to share, collaborate, communicate and discuss with friends and family – so it is logical that we should take this mentality into the workplace with us.
Thanks to this shift, in the workplace our fellow employees and customers now understand the benefits and importance of complementing the legacy communication tools with the new digital enterprise social platforms. We use them all the time and appreciate their benefits in personal life, therefore we want them to help us do our jobs more effectively.
The future of corporate communications and collaboration
With that in mind, at Orange Business we understand the importance of having an end-to-end corporate collaboration system that is available to everybody within our network. We operate an enterprise solution based on Jive technology which has apps plugged in on top of it, so that all our employees are able to use tools like email clients, web browsers, instant messengers and more to collaborate with one another no matter where they are based.
So we took this collaborative approach into our customer offering; a centralized collaboration platform that we then customize to each of our customers’ specific needs. The focus is clear – we want our customers to benefit from the tools and processes that we use ourselves and, so far, they have found that the tools are not complex, they are not isolated away from their other tools and social platforms – they can integrate it with Twitter and other social apps for example – and they can also integrate it with tools like Sharepoint. It literally integrates all the required enterprise collaboration apps within the one platform with minimal fuss and disruption.
In our experience, this is very much the crux of the issue – our customers like to know that we not only offer centralized collaboration suites to them as an Orange Business product, but that we also practice what we preach. We believe in them and we already reap their benefits. We use these collaboration tools ourselves - we call it “Plazza”.
Making enterprise collaboration a reality – on a global scale
The social centralized collaboration hub is the new collaboration trend, all your collaboration tools in one place on top of one central platform. To enable this collaboration hub and accompany our customers in their internal digital transformation, Orange Business has also developed Community Management as a Service – a business consulting approach which includes community set-up, implementation, launch and interlock with the community that the customer is working with.
Coming on top of the technology, it helps removing the pain of transitioning from legacy tools to the new ones. It is an end to end solution that gives our customers everything to hit the ground running and get collaborating straight away. This suite is based in our official Orange Business collaboration tool “Plazza” for global level and scale organizations.
In our experience, the demand and reasons for enterprise collaboration are now clear and the business case makes sense. 96 per cent of executives have cited lack of collaboration or ineffective communications as the main source of their workplace failures, while 39 per cent of employees believe people in their organization do not collaborate enough. Collaboration tools are here to stay and are only set to grow.
We live in a world where Collaboration is the MASTER key to success! – Embark on it, Embrace it, Have fun with it!
