The concept of social workplace
The style of working has increasingly become non-linear in organizations. Every company now understands the importance of integration among the departments to remain competitive in the market. Virtual enterprises and networked organizations have become a norm. Continuous communication between staff in dispersed locations has become every organization’s routine. The ultimate objective to produce better quality products and reduce the release time is facilitated by collaboration between the entities of the organization.
The rise of social media has influenced enterprise collaboration in a big way and has brought in the idea of informal integration. There has been a paradigm shift from one-to-many to many-to-many communications. E-mail, document sharing, and portals are examples of one-to-many communication while blogs, micro blogs, wikis etc are Many-to-many where the content is persistent and available to everyone from anywhere. More and more organizations are adopting social collaboration tools to connect employees and enable them to work in a creative manner.
Collaboration tools can bring collaboration of the following types to the organization
- Document Based : Creation, routing, version control
- Message Based : Instant messaging, chat-rooms
- Project Based : Planning, execution and reporting
- Learning Based : Video/Web conferencing
- Community Based : knowledge sharing
- Process Based : Process management, workflow
These collaboration tools are becoming unique touch points to start conversations, engage communities and develop innovative ideas. This is seen as the right approach to tap into the brainpower and energy of resources as the ideas can come from anyone, anywhere and anytime.
Collaborate Cloud is one such collaboration tool that offers company-wide collaboration of departments and processes and brings every stakeholder to one single platform. It offers great flexibility for customization where the customer can design its own forms, Apps, workflows, groups and processes. It also has an App store that contains commonly used business functions to easily setup the basic infrastructure for the organization. With successful implementation for clients in the retail domain, it is now poised to serve clients in other domains like education and manufacturing.
Forward looking companies including startups should analyze the use of collaboration tools in their company to yield faster and more productive teams.
