Why Organizations need Collaboration and Communication tools?

Close your eyes and imagine a day without a Computer, telephone / cell phone, email, internet - NO WORD, NO EXCEL and NO PPT. Can you re-collect any such day?  80-90% answer is NO. You must be using atleast one of these, if not all.

In a typical office environment - A day starts with checking emails, attending meetings, chatting on messenger, use company intranet, Internet and various LoB (Line of Business) heterogeneous applications – Web based Legacy, homegrown or ERP/SAP. An individual (for e.g. in an IT company, to which we can better relate) plays multiple roles and has various responsibilities - task initiator to an approver or may be an administrator or an auditor. All these elements are inter-woven and consolidated into complex matrix, based on the functions of an Individual and the operation of an organization - access is granted or restricted to systems/tools (SSO:Single-Sign-On is major challenge).

 

On any given day, we do lot of various offline activities (out side of LOB applications) and upon completion of a transaction, records it in the System. Let’s take example of a PO transaction, most of the data  is available in system / application but information which made this decision possible is not easily available – it’s scattered across in text / XLS formats, word documents, outlook emails, scanned documents, workflows and etc. in a local PC or user desktop. From the LOB application, you can find out the PO information, however, the how and why decision - data is missing. This is a major Compliance and Integrity issue.

Likewise 80-90% of critical business decision information is scattered in local machines and user desktops without any security and access controls.  Retrieval of this information in future is probably an issue with no search capability and sharing the data.

In a current environment, cost of developing software’s - web-based applications and portal solutions is key factor for any Organization. The cost of maintaining software assets has escalated. Further, there is a relentless business pressure for rapid development, quality, productivity, and faster time to market. In such scenario, optimum extent of development of web-based applications, Intranet, extranet, Portals and other content / document management software assets including collaboration and sharing the artifacts that will lower risks significantly during the specified intended usage is of primary importance.

Therefore, it’s vital for an organization to have collaboration and communication tool which will enable easy teams to work together effectively, collaborate on and publish documents, maintain task lists, implement workflows, and share information through the use of wikis and blogs, Personalized Portals, Enterprise Search, Document Management with version control, Business process enabling via forms and built-in BI – Business intelligence.
 
There is a technology ECM feature-list war happening between big wigs (Major ECM product vendors) Microsoft (MOSS2007), IBM Lotus Notes / FileNet, EMC Documentum, Hummingbird, Interwoven, OpenText, Stellent and Vignette. The time will tell - who will lead this ECM race.

Comments

[Betty]

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Betty

[dewsoype]

I should email you about this.

[meninvestor]

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