Organisations need to leverage more on collaboration technology to improve their competitive position, according to the 2016 Connected Enterprise Report published by Dimension Data.
The report’s findings are based on a study of 900 participants in 15 countries, and participants include IT directors, CIOs and line of business managers working in organisations with over 1,000 employees.
One in five organisations polled revealed that collaboration technology had failed to improve their competitive positioning. In contrast, on a global scale 87% of organisations said the use of collaboration technology had improved teamwork, and 88% of enterprises had accelerated decision making.
In Singapore, 70% of organisations polled have a defined collaboration strategy, and approximately half of these organisations have a strategic variance by business unit. Organisations in Singapore tend to be more regional than global. Hence, collaboration technologies are used mostly to support regional operations and engaging with employees, partners and customers across the region. On a different note, employees from organisations surveyed in Singapore tend to be more office based, with 33% stating that they have never worked outside their offices, compared to 14% globally.
Nagi Kasinadhuni, General Manager – Communications at Dimension Data Asia Pacific, says that apart from improving employee productivity and teamwork, the research indicates that globally, more organisations are turning to collaboration to drive new revenue and sales.
“Some 14% – the second highest number of respondents in the Report – said improving sales is the top goal of their collaboration strategy, while one in three organisations said increased sales was among the three most important ways of measuring the success of their collaboration projects.”
Conversely, Singapore organisations are placing a higher emphasis on productivity enhancement and less emphasis on improving revenue and sales and accelerating decision making, as compared to organisations globally. More specifically, some 32% of them place improving productivity as the topmost goal as compared to 19% of their global counterparts – this perhaps indicates that organisations in Singapore could profit from connecting collaboration with these financial benefits.
“Enterprises have had varying degrees of success when it comes to the improvements that the use of collaboration technology was intended to provide,” explains Brian Riggs, Principal Analyst – Enterprise Services at research firm, Ovum. “They’ve become adept at improving teamwork and productivity, partly because they can work directly with employees to make this happen. But leveraging collaboration to improve competitiveness or streamline business processes can be a lot more complicated. It involves larger changes to how the company does business, and its role within its industry. These changes can take significant time and effort to achieve.”
A quarter of those organisations polled said they measure the success of their collaboration projects by how well they’ve implemented the technology, rather than how it’s used and adopted throughout the organisation. One out of three IT departments see moving unified communication and collaboration to the cloud as the most important technology trend affecting their collaboration strategy. However, less than 25% of organisations currently rely on hosted collaboration services.
Seventy percent of organisations in Singapore – in comparison to 63% recorded globally – believe that consumer grade collaboration tools better meet their needs, with 53% of organisations in Singapore using consumer grade tools despite these being turned down by IT.
This poses a serious risk for the industry given that these consumer-grade tools are largely a freemium service and lack security features and customisation possibilities. This suggests that it is getting increasingly difficult to enforce corporate wide guidelines on the usage of collaboration tools within the organisations, while highlighting a trend that employees prefer to use the same tools for work related communications, as well as personal use.
At one out of three organisations, enterprise social collaboration is used by all – or most –employees, and nearly half of all companies that were surveyed said they expect social collaboration usage to increase over the next year.