Over the past few months, Avanade has been abuzz (even more so than usual) about an important shift that is on the minds of many of our customers: bringing more social effective collaboration tools in the enterprise to help employees work better together.
Social Collaboration is a big topic in enterprises worldwide, but what does that really mean? And is social collaboration really living up to its promise?
At Avanade, we think (and industry leaders agree) that social collaboration encompasses all of the tools and processes that can power today’s mobile, dispersed and networked way of getting work done. These tools make it easier for employees to stay connected, work better in teams, speed the flow of information and get more work done.
Sounds like the ideal workplace, right? As new ways of work are explored, many of our customers say their employees are increasingly asking for these social collaboration tools. And from what we’ve found in conversations and our own innovation workshops across the globe, businesses large and small are looking for help in how to connect the dots to make social collaboration a reality. At Avanade, we call it our Fabric, and it drives our goal to be the ultimate connected global organization.
Avanade has made several important efforts of our own to foster collaboration among our 18,000 professionals worldwide, leveraging a centralized and robust global intranet as well as social collaboration tools such as personal blogs, microblogging and communities to encourage knowledge and information sharing.
We’ve incorporated video capabilities into our Lync instant messaging platform to facilitate even more effective communication across time zones and geographies. In short, we’ve instituted many best practices to ensure that collaboration is at the heart of everything we do, and are passing that experience onto businesses that are just getting started.
We know social collaboration is alive and well because we work with many customers who have already taken significant leaps in breathing life into their own social collaboration vision. For example, we enabled global water company Xylem to extend collaboration to vendors and partners, and we’ve helped a multinational chemical company design and implement a multi-year collaboration transformation that has significantly increased employee involvement and eliminated virtual information silos.
We’ve also partnered with a newly merged global telecom company to deploy a social collaboration platform to tap talent and expertise, boost teamwork, and share collective knowledge. And we’re leading a three-year collaboration initiative for a global asset management company that has dramatically changed the way employees connect with one another.
But we also know that social collaboration often requires significant transformation in the workplace. To further discussions with our customers, Avanade sought to gauge the sentiment of global IT and business decision-makers and employees around their perceptions of social collaboration. So we asked them for their opinions, and, announced findings from a global survey that outlines key perceptions about enterprise social collaboration.
The survey found that organizations are adopting social collaboration tools to connect employees and enable them to more easily work together in a creative fashion. And, in the next 12 months, even more businesses plan to adopt enterprise social collaboration tools.
Indeed, social collaboration is all about making work easier and more efficient. We think it’s a significant shift whose time has come.
