Managing Your Collaboration Ecosystem

Collaboration is communication between two or more people connected from anywhere, anytime to share ideas, build consensus, establish direction, and/or accomplish a specified goal. It is what we attempt to do every day in our business and personal lives. Businesses need to connect to other businesses and customers. People need to connect with each other. Efficient collaboration is only achieved when everyone is on the same page.
Here are some reasons why your company needs to take your collaboration ecosystem seriously:
 

Employees spend over two thirds of their time connecting and collaborating.
Almost 1.9 billion people or 43% of the global workforce will be working remotely by 2022
Nearly fifteen percent of employee work time is lost due to insufficient communication.
Roughly $11K is lost per employee, per year due to ineffective communication.

The way we collaborate has undergone more dramatic changes in the last twenty years than in the one hundred years following Alexander Graham Bell’s great invention. Exciting new changes are being introduced and adopted more rapidly than ever before. RSI has always believed that communication is the lifeline of your business and remains committed to helping managers wade through adoption and optimize complex ecosystems.
 
The convergence of voice and data, the huge strides in bandwidth speeds and the creativity of industry leaders like Microsoft, Cisco, Google, Avaya, Broadsoft, Mitel and many others is creating massive disruption in the space. Communication has evolved from a point-to-point audio connection to a collection of participants huddling in virtual groups or teams empowered through voice, video, and chat. Participants can conveniently meet, collaborate, share ideas and complex designs through presentations, file share, screen share or whiteboard using any device from anywhere.
Collaboration solutions such as Slack, Cisco Spark, Microsoft Skype for Business/Teams. Google G Suite, Avaya/Zang Spaces and many others are forcing managers to think beyond the enterprise. These solutions address the realities of today’s digital and mobile world. People are demanding more from their communication ecosystem. They need to be able to access information anytime in secure but flexible work spaces from any device.
Traditional communication providers and several prominent entrants are offering Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) that allow you to select your own blend (voice, video, chat, meeting, file sharing, scheduling, etc.) tailored to your business needs.
Communication platform as a service (cPaaS) are powerful cloud based do-it-yourself frameworks that offer ultimate power to tailor the communication experience. Many traditional PBX/UCaaS providers now offer truly customizable communication platforms (incl. Avaya/Zang, Cisco/Spark/Tropo, Genband/Kandy) along with pace-setter Twilio.
The increasing popularity of these systems and dozens of other pre-designed collaboration Software as a Service (SaaS) makes decisions about how to communicate even more complex. The management problem is magnified when solutions are chosen and deployed. Metrics about adoption, customer experience and ROI are difficult to consolidate and reconcile across one vendor’s offerings let alone multiple vendors.
The evolution of communication tools has transformed our lives and allowed us to be agile and mobile. Managers no longer need to be tied to their desks to act, react and enact solutions based on concrete real time quantitative information.
Desktop, hybrid and cloud products for analyzing, voice, video, chat, email, meetings and collaboration teams are vital to communication management. Managers need concrete information about their business collaboration ecosystem to monitor adoption, guard against misuse, meet compliance standards, ensure network efficiency, optimize customer experience, manage the workforce and empower productivity.