3 Ways Collaboration Improves Workflows

By nature, we think of collaboration in terms of communications, mainly because the vendors are primarily in the communications business. There is an entirely separate world of vendors offering purpose-built solutions for project management and mapping workflows, and these really don’t register much in the collaboration space.

Increasingly, communications applications are embedded in those offerings, and while there will be some overlap with the vendors you know, the spaces will remain fairly separate.

As such, offerings like unified communications and team messaging tend to be communications-centric, where the value is rooted in making communications easier. There’s nothing wrong with that position, especially since these offerings are a big step forward from the way workers collaborate with legacy applications.

In this context, it’s important to remember the literal meaning of UC – the ability to unify various modes of communication into a singular experience and workspace.

Collaboration Is More Than Just Communication

Standalone applications – desk phone, email, IM, video, fax, etc. – work well for their intended purpose, but orchestrating them was never in the cards until UC came along. Today, those challenges have largely been solved.

At face value, there’s a sameness to most UC offerings. For IT decision makers concerned with getting good business value, there’s a risk to focusing solely on these communications capabilities. The more UC is viewed as a communications commodity, the more price-driven your buying decisions will be and the less strategic it becomes to your organization.

That’s also bad news for IT, since your role will become valued more for being able to reduce costs rather than make workers more productive or the organization more agile. IT should always aim for these two goals; for collaboration, the starting point should be view communications as a means, not an end.

Providing seamless communications across all modes is definitely important, but the real business value comes from what those capabilities enable. Productivity is driven now by how workers interact with communications tools, so you need to focus on how collaboration makes workflows easier.

This means that offerings like UC must be easy to use in terms of getting things done. We now have more options than ever before to make phone calls, but the value comes from choosing the right option for the task at hand so workers can keep the collaboration process moving.

To illustrate, here are three workflow elements that should be carefully considered when evaluating collaboration vendors. Beyond the core communications capabilities, you should determine how well they address each of these.

Workflow Element #1: Sharing Files and Content

Communicating to enable dialogue is part of the collaboration process. The bigger the team, the more important this becomes. To some extent, this also holds for how distributed the team is. Teams work best in real time, and most workflows involve co-browsing, co-creating and co-editing.

These needs are not so problematic when everyone is in the same meeting room, but today this is more the exception than the rule. As such, you should carefully consider how well vendors handle content sharing, especially for your particular needs. Text-based documents are fairly straightforward, but things can be more challenging when collaborating with large files or data-intensive modes such as high-resolution images or video. Scenarios such as medical imaging, digital content or engineering design will have more demands around content sharing for workflows, so there’s a bigger story here than just making communication easier.

Workflow Element #2: Seamless Integration

The first value layer for collaboration platforms like UC is having seamless integration among the various communications modes used by workers. Often, this means integrating modes that workers already use and are familiar with, and UC simply makes for a better communications experience. However, there will also be cases where the business is adding a new mode to the mix – such as video – in which case UC brings added value by providing a richer communications palette.

However, there’s a second value layer that must be considered, and that has to do with how well these communications applications integrate with other types of applications that facilitate workflows. Everyday applications such as Office 365 are part of this, but so are more specialized applications such as CRM, business intelligence, billing systems, inventory management, HR, etc. Workflow requirements here are closely related to element #1, so it will be important to determine what integrations will be needed for your organization and how well collaboration vendors can support them.

Workflow Element #3: Consistent UX

With the rise of both mobility and remote working, the environment for collaboration has become more diverse, fluid and challenging. UC platforms generally do a good job now of supporting various devices, endpoints, networks and workplace settings. A big part of their value is providing a consistent user experience across all these permutations.

That UX, however, needs to go beyond communications applications. The same must also hold for the examples cited in element #2, as those applications must also work equally well across a variety of settings. As such, IT decision makers need to step back and consider the mix of settings used across the organization. For workflows to go smoothly in terms of a consistent UX, your next collaboration investment will need to support both types of applications, and not just those for communications.