5 Reasons Organizations Require Real Time Collaboration

By Hyoun Park Mar 15, 2011

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Enterprise collaboration is challenging for many organizations, but it has also become a necessity. Here are five reasons why real time collaboration is required.

"Collaboration" is the Problem

Why is it so difficult to get the right people working together in a company? People have spent millennia learning how to work with each other, but it still seems as if each set of tools and each new level of complexity only serves to separate us further. Why does this happen?

I blame "collaboration." Although the goal of improving collaboration sounds positive, the term "collaboration" has been consistently abused by technology vendors, end user associations and even well-meaning employees seeking to align specific technologies with business improvements.

Based on public-facing information, one could think that collaboration is defined as a group of people, a form of unified communications, a data-driven middleware solution or simply the day-to-day interactions that we already pursue with our fellow co-workers.

Real-Time Collaboration

To better understand how companies pursue collaboration, Aberdeen recently completed a research effort entitled Real-Time Collaboration: Innovate Your Business and Increase Revenue. Collaboration should not simply be an aggregation of people or a suite of technologies. Conference calls and big meetings aren't collaboration. Unified communication isn't collaboration.

Anyone who has endured the pain of a large conference call where everyone speaks and nobody gets anything done can understand the need for focused collaboration with specific goals in mind. At the same time, our ability to work together has definitely changed with the development of conferencing, presence, video, social business platforms and information aggregation.

Given these challenges of breadth and scope, how should we define collaboration? Aberdeen starts with the assumption that collaboration is defined as teams working together to achieve business-driven goals.

From a business perspective, companies are largely goaled on their ability to increase revenue on a year-over-year basis and to show the value of the investments that have been made. Although this sounds simple, there are multiple components that must be included.

People Must Be Involved: Fully automated middleware and process management solutions may increase throughput and accelerate productivity, but these technology solutions do not take human input and intelligence into account to find solutions. The human element must be part of the collaborative equation.
People Must Work Together: Rather than simply seeing people lecture each other or go through serial decision processes such as basic email, true collaboration requires that people bring multiple skill sets and perspectives together into a unified effort. Without this team effort, people are not truly collaborating, they're just throwing bodies at a problem and hoping for results.
The Team Must Be Focused on Accomplishing Business Goals: From an enterprise perspective, this teamwork must be associated with key business objectives such as revenue improvement, customer satisfaction, and increased operational efficiency.

Based on these assumptions, Aberdeen's most recent research effort on collaboration focused on companies that excelled in revenue growth in 2010 and studied the strategies, innovation approaches and organizational structures used by these companies to understand the trends that separated the Best-in-Class organizations from all others. These divisions were defined as follows: