Enterprise Collaboration Trends

Increasing globalization, new technologies and rapid changes in rules and regulations constantly reshape the competitive landscape, even for industries that once seemed stable, such as the automotive industry. To respond to this chaotic and continuously changing environment, organizations are placing a premium on innovation. Collaboration can accelerate the pace of innovation in three key ways: by promoting real-time organizational awareness of opportunities for innovation, by shortening the cycle time for experiment conception and design, and by tapping the power of grassroots participation to drive acceptance, adoption and expansion of ideas.¹’

A McKinsey & Company report asserts the high value of employee contribution through collaboration. The figure below depicts a networking map which illustrates potential opportunities which were missed as a result of absence of collaboration with expertise people. 

The term ‘Knowledge Worker’ was coined by Peter Drucker almost half a century ago. In the current globalized world, the whole buzz is to employ ‘Knowledge Worker’ and stay ahead of competitors through highly innovated ideas. As the need of the this type of workforce within the enterprise is steadily raising so does the tools and technologies that keep them abreast of information is also on rise.

The raising popularity of web 2.0 and social networking technologies confirms the high importance of collaboration and knowledge sharing. One of the reasons for this raise in Web 2.0 and social networking is due to fall in communication costs. A report states that a 3 minute phone call from New York to London in 1960 was $60.42 and in 1980 it was $6.32 and in 2000 it was 40 cents. This fall in communication costs was due to fiber optics glut in the late 1990s.A recent statistics about the interaction in social medias are overwhelming.

Few facts about content shared across social medias 

· 250 million tweets per day in Twitter

· 4 billion content shared on Facebook each day

· 24 hours of video uploaded every minute in YouTube

· More than 3.5 million articles in English language and more than 17 million articles across all languages in Wikipedia.

· 43 % of US companies will be blogging by 2012

· Over 210 billion emails are sent out daily 

‘Social networking entering the workplace is becoming 'industrialised' in process, and integrated into the collaboration mix, what increases the potential for productive creativity and accelerates business decision-making and responsiveness.²’ 

Although these are the compelling facts for enterprises to adopt enterprise collaboration, they still face daunting challenges that has to be addressed to implement a successful collaboration framework within their enterprise.