13 Enterprise Communication and Collaboration

Dr. Ashish Saihjpal

1. Learning Outcome:

After completing this module the students will be able to:

• Understand the basic concept of collaboration and communication in an enterprise.
• Understand the need for collaborative technologies.
• Understand the benefits that are obtained by effective collaboration and communication.
• List various industries that benefit from enterprise collaboration.
• List down challenges posed by implementation of collaborative systems.
• Study successful implementation and deployments of enterprise collaboration and communication systems.

2.  Introduction

Collaboration is not a new phenomenon. Man, as often called a social animal, is in need of leading a cooperative life since the start. Working together to do a task or complete a project is an everyday experience for most adults. However, at the enterprise level where technical expertise is required, the need for collaboration arises. The concept of enterprise collaboration traces back to the inception of the enterprise itself. Fundamentally, the word ‘collaboration’ refers to working or completing a task in cohesion with other stakeholders. At the enterprise level, having the right task assigned to the right resources within the right time frame to fulfill business goals is called as ‘Enterprise Collaboration’ (Exhibit 1). With dynamic changes at workplace, organizations need to make and implement decision swiftly to ensure their hold in the marketplace. Enterprise collaboration and communication is clearly an important success factor in today’s knowledge based economies. There lies expertise in developing the right collaboration strategy, synthesizing the optimal implementation plan and estimating the return on investment.

Economic pressures and fast evolving business philosophy are driving organizations to look for flexible yet productive ways of working, communicating and managing. Organizations now seek means of reducing costs and minimizing capital expenditure while boosting productivity.

Enterprise Solutions that helps work teams to capture, store, process and transmit data in digital form electronically are also termed as Office Automation Systems. It refers to both the software and the hardware to get the routine processes to get automated. Exhibit 2 showcases various application areas supported by office automation systems.

Office Automation Suites may utilize equipment for teleconferencing and video conferencing, run training sessions and product demonstrations on Webex as shown in Exhibit 3. Use of high speed scanners and printers to manage documentation in bulk, use of knowledge management tools to archive essential product related information are all examples of Office Automation Systems.

2.1 IT and Communication Convergence

Enterprises today are driven by the objective to reduce costs but at the same time, the speed at which the data and voice that needs to be converged for communication needs to be high. Organizations to a great extent are on the goal of reducing office space, unnecessary travel time and multimedia collaboration and so, the options for working from home are becoming increasingly popular. Therefore, use of information technology has been instrumental in development of many tools which makes enterprise collaboration effective. Exhibit 4 highlights multiple areas where enterprise collaboration systems find applications.

The necessity for collaboration and communication arises from the need for sustained business continuity in critical and sensitive situations. There lies the inevitable need to ensure recovery and restoration in case of an adversity so that business is not affected.

To enable an organization to remain operational in such disruptive events, unification of communication can be of great help. Let us now try to understand the concept of unification. Unification in context of communication implies a desktop virtualization project. This kind of a system can capture requirements even from the worker’s home email applications. The communication and collaboration capability helps to deploy an end to end integrated solution rather than discrete tools. This allows user to access from any location be it home and office or on travel and tailored to meet the end user’s specific requirements. Exhibit 5 gives a snapshot of what desktop virtualization looks like.

3. Need for Communication and Collaboration

Major trends and developments that make collaboration and communication a critical success factor for enterprises are:

Globalization – Every enterprise in today’s world is affected by the globalization. As Cisco Inc reports, ‘Web 2.0 and social networking technologies are making Cisco’s globalization efforts far more effective than they previously were.’

Expertise and specialization – With converging platforms and increased complexity of business processes, specialists and technology experts are needed, who are competent to work across multiple platforms and establish collaboration within and among the enterprises. Hence, making collaboration more important than ever.

Innovation – Collaborative technologies need innovative design and implementation to build the cross technology platforms. These cater to multiple business processes simultaneously. Thus, resulting in shortening the cycle time for design, acceptance and adoption of ideas.

Geographic dispersion of expertise – As companies work across different geographies, they pick the best expertise. Teams work across multiple countries in consultation with best of the functional domain experts e.g. while business could be centered across Asia Pacific, the research and development could be based out of Europe.

Falling cost of communication – With the use of fiber optics, the dot com has enabled technologies like voice over internet protocol (VoIP) that have significantly reduced call rates and cost of communication. This has, thus, made collaboration cost effective.

Widespread adoption of web 2.0 technologies – Web 2.0 technologies have permeated in our social lives at a very fast pace e.g. it took the radio 38 years, television 13 years, Internet 4 years to reach 50 million users which Facebook achieved in less than 9 months (Exhibit 6). Such advancements have made enterprise communication and collaboration more importance for the organizations.

Aggressive timelines – With teams distributed across the globe, a collaborative system brings the workforce and their management under a common platform. A software package allows the workforce to observe a time line in which business requirements are to be met. It enables easy task allocation among teams and provides details on a real time basis that are required for each activity.Let’s try and understand the relevance of collaborative systems with the following examples.

Document Management System – A document management system and its distinct features are highlighted in Exhibit 7. With everyone working on the same version of the document, the collaboration process will be tracked by the document management system. This ensures that everyone always accesses the latest version. The easy to use search functions help to fetch any old mail or documents.

Email vs. Task Management – This feature makes it easier to translate an email to a “Task”. This gets reflected in project management which allows the project manager to track and monitor the complete lifecycle of the task.

• Web conferencing, contact management and calendars – An integrated system allows participants in a conference to share and access documents, despite the physical distance. They share benefits of working on the same version of the file simultaneously.
• A contact management system can integrate with voice or video conferencing. When synchronized with the calendar feature of the email client, it can send automatic reminders to each user. Also, selected contacts can be sent a meeting invite depending on the agenda.

3. Benefits of Enterprise Collaboration

Enterprise Productivity – When business communication is integrated with social interaction and mitigated with business processes, it enhances productivity. Team members have a common platform to make suggestions, seek clarifications, expertise; share knowledge based resources and has clarity of features to be incorporated.

Social media interactions are a good way to observe employee participation and contribution at an individual level. It also enables employees to participate in discussion forums and read reviews. This not only makes the team participants more aware but considers opinions and takes business decisions accordingly. They can predict bugs and problems needed for rectification, implement timely maintenance activities and upgrades, and share the solutions with the right people.

Real Time communication – Companies intend to establish communication on a real time basis rather than collaborate events and activities that are not coordinated in time. In order to remain proactive in response and close the feedback loop, organizations today embrace the social platform to work more effectively.

Consolidation of IT capabilities – Consolidating business processes intends to see deeper and more widespread convergence of knowledge-management activities that complement collaboration. It further helps in funneling and filtering large amounts of information to employees. The complexity is to create a user to make information available to employees when they need it.

Organizations carry business processes which cannot be completed in isolation. They are completed with inputs from different functional departments like product development, research, operations, strategy and marketing. Group interactions can help oversee complications that could be overlooked by one department alone. Despite the physical distance, collaboration helps to avoid any miscommunication.

Lowering administrative cost – By replacing internal meetings and live events with virtual, collaborative events, organizations can save printing and travel cost considerably. Another major cost includes production and archival by end users as well as backup and storage by IT professionals. These costs are too reduced as with collaboration there is no duplication of such activities.

Outsourcing – Enterprises aim at profit maximization and cost minimization. One of the strategies to achieve this is by outsourcing non-core capabilities to a third party (Exhibit 9). However, as the scale of outsourcing expands so does the investment in managing it. Enabling collaboration through extended enterprise helps reduce such costs by way of easy exchange of information within and among the enterprises, lessening of re-work time and meeting the deadlines.

Quick decision making – Collaboration facilitates quick decision making and lesser turnaround time to handle queries and come with solutions. This helps to maintain the swift pace in which day to day business decisions have to move.

5. Industry vide Applications of Collaboration Technologies

The magnitude and importance of collaboration and communication technologies vary from one industry to another. This can be understood from a snapshot of the industry vide applications discussed below.

 Government – The government departments are under constant demand for immediate response, transparency and compliance. Coordination and knowledge sharing in the government sector is needed not only at the central level but also at the state and at local level for welfare, security or disaster management etc.

Knowledge – Service organizations – These organizations rely on the power of knowledge for value creation and gaining competitive advantage in the industry. Whether the organizations are focused on certification, compliance regulation, consultation or transformation, the knowledge organizations are of firm belief that ‘knowing’ sells and ‘knowing how’ facilitates the firms to deliver. The role of enterprise collaboration and communication increases as the amount of information multiply. It becomes critical for the service to manage and harness the collective knowledge of its stakeholders.

High Technology – The shortening of innovation cycle because of frequent technological up gradations, changing consumer needs and ever increasing competition due to globalization has pressurized the high-tech industry to take the advantage of integrating its functions and partners across the value chain. In this context, enterprise collaboration can provide scalable, robust and secure platforms.

Pharmaceuticals – This industry needs to produce output that stringently follows regulatory compliances and clinical procedures. As the product development stage is both time consuming and cost driven, therefore, it becomes more imperative for the pharmaceutical companies to identify the failures at an early stage so as to avoid high negative returns. Enterprise collaboration in such industry facilitates sharing of relevant information amongst the key stakeholders for taking the corrective actions at the right time.

Hospitality – The hotel industry is in seasonal demand which depends on upcoming events or Effective information sharing in real-time can greatly help travel agencies and customers seeking reservation related information to block dates accordingly. Exhibit 11 shows the use of hotel reservation system.

6. Enterprise Collaboration Challenges

The enterprise collaboration and communication come with their own challenges; the large or small company may face the following problems while adopting collaborative systems:

• Mismanaged data – The volume of data is growing considerably and most of this data found in organizations are unstructured and unmanaged. This leads to information mismanagement. With bulk of the data being unmanaged it is hard to find inaccessible, duplicated, uncontrolled and unprotected information. Such mismanagement of data may lead to difficulty in adoption of enterprise collaboration.
• Misaligned culture – Some organizations may lack the sharing/co-operative culture, where there may not be free inter-department communication. This not only leads to more time in task completion, but multiple iterations to fix errors and duplication of efforts.
• Privacy issues – Collaboration facilitates data sharing at the click of a button. While the cost of sharing and transmitting information lowers the cost of securing and encrypting it increases. With collaboration too much of the information is accessed by unauthorized users which may pose a danger to the secrecy and privacy of the organization.
• Compatibility issues – Integration of technology under a common platform offers interoperability, time management, resource sharing and cost minimizations. However, these benefits are not easy to quantify.
• Cost of training – Collaboration tools are one of the most diligent ways for enterprises to use and manage resources. However, the implementation needs training and adaptation. Migration to new systems and doing away with the conventional ones takes time and investment in training.
• Unknown and untapped expertise – Knowing how to connect the right people to the right tasks help capitalize on their expertise. Opportunities are lost when the right people do not work together. Work is duplicated since people are unaware of each other’s work. Thus, correct estimation/identification is a challenge. A social networking platform (Exhibit 13) offers a room for experts to share views, exchange reviews and ideas on technology and make necessary improvements in their business models.

7. Successful Business Cases using Collaborative Technologies

7.1K-ollaboration at Kellogg’s

Kellogg’s as they call it, states its purpose to “Nourishing families so they can flourish and thrive”. They offer a huge basket of cereals and products ranging from their standard breakfast cornflakes to flavored snacks. The company has manufacturing base in 18 countries and markets its product in over 180 countries globally; they manage a complex and global supply chain.

For such a huge conglomerate, the daunting task of bringing the workforce under a common platform was a big challenge. This could be met with integrating the departments across organizations and regional boundaries. The company named this initiative as K Connect – a tool for information sharing across the boundaries.

Infosys built the portal on the Microsoft SharePoint platform. Eventually, after a go-ahead from the experts, the previous databases, websites and other applications were finally migrated

While the technical experts built the K-Connect, the managers defined a change management strategy.The new portal was launched over a two year period with a number of behavioral and cultural changes.The success was a result of key partnerships between Kellogg business units, IT Group and Infosys.

Sharing the same platform

The new platform has contributed significantly to a number of strategic goals. It led to the replacement of a number of old legacy platforms to a standardized converged platform. This change not only affected marketing communications but also reduced various administrative expenses.

K-Connect streamlines the abilities of Kellogg’s to distribute communication across regions and businesses. This helps ensure all of Kellogg’s employees understand a company’s business priorities and objectives. K- Connect helps Kellogg’s foster connectedness. Employees across the globe feel less isolated from the company’s headquarters in Michigan. The implementation also enables Kellogg’s to integrate people more quickly following corporate acquisitions.

7.2  Driving communication and collaboration at Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Companies for the likes of Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) offer sustainable competitive advantage since their business spans geographical boundaries. Among their business models is hosted business model or managed services. They rely on lowering operating cost and achieving economies of scale.

HPE is among the largest Microsoft SharePoint Deployments worldwide. This platform has integrated a workforce of 2,50,000 employees, 80,000 vendors and clients to communicate and collaborate globally. This implementation provides both front and back office operations.

Sharing data, documents, calendars; managing workflows – SharePoint facilitates document review and approvals by automatically notifying people who need to sign off, on process steps and track approvals, rejections. This is much faster than email or manual procedure as SharePoint does it for people. It also provides a central searchable repository of information. The business teams can quickly access up – to – date documentation, technical data sheets, firmware updates, proposal templates and organizational charts.

Features such as Product Demos and Training Calendars get integrated with each user profile and synchronized with his email account. This is an automated job once he receives the email in his account. It no longer needs individual reminders or need to send mailers to email ids in bulk. The client is programmed to show a blinker well in time.

It is a single platform with user friendly interface for the work community to adapt to. Nexus – the Knowledge Management Portal is an archival repository that holds necessary documentation, specifications and user manuals and guides to assist the technologists. Its helps in information sharing and keeping product related information up to date.

SharePoint has been instrumental in keeping employees informed and stay connected. They can seek expert advice when needed and render support when needed by other functional departments.

8.  Summary

“For many employees today, collaborative, complex problem solving is the essence of their work. These tactic activities involve exchange of information, the making of judgments and a need to draw on multifaceted forms of knowledge in exchange with co-workers, customers and suppliers.”

The pace of digitization and advent of cloud computing enables web technologies to be the key drivers and runners of globalization. It has enabled multiple specializations, hosted businesses globally and revenue share models between stakeholders who are masters of their business. Also, trends such as falling cost of communications and adoption of Web 2.0 technologies make investing in enabling technologies more attractive.

Hence, the rise in social networking has breathed a new life into collaboration. To increase productivity and unleash the potential at the individual, team and enterprise level, the organizations must move beyond stand alone social and collaboration channels. Their functionality should be incorporated in to the core business processes. Hence, the new approach lies into building social, collaborative applications throughout the enterprise. Integrating collaboration channels into business processes has the potential to streamline the way employees work and make business processes more efficient.

Web Resources

• http://www.appstechnews.com/news/2015/mar/23/five-enterprise-challenges-solved-social-collaboration-tools
• https://www.infosys.com/…/case-studies/…/enterprise-collaboration.pdf
• www.oracle.com/us/corporate/…/enterprise-collaboration-wp-171715.pdf