Collaboration Technologies

Collaboration supports most core business activities today. An effective collaborative environment, aided by proper collaboration tools, can lead to dramatic increases in business value through more effective business processes as well as decreased IT support requirements and costs.

Knowledge has become an essential asset in the modern world for individuals, teams, and entire organizations. Collaboration technologies and tools aid knowledge workers in the following ways:

• By connecting people with the right information at the right time — just-in-time information is vital for accurate and timely decisions and it avoids unnecessary duplication and costly hoarding of information.
• By connecting people with the right people (either other employees or external to the organization) — identifying and locating the proper knowledge sources in an organization (and even across organizations) can be a difficult and time-consuming task that collaboration tools can greatly reduce.
• By connecting people at the right time — by showing presence and current online status, collaboration tools can minimize futile communication attempts, such as missed calls and invitations to offline recipients.
• By connecting people with the right business processes — the fluid nature of businesses today, influenced by globalization and project-based teams, demands flexible communication and collaboration mechanisms.

Studies have shown there are significant benefits. Collaboration tools have begun to lower IT costs for the following reasons:

• Remote access technologies allow faster roll out of new services and products, with no associated client installation costs, and give the administrator greater control over their use.
• P2P technologies reduce reliance on dedicated servers and enable users to administer much of the process themselves.

Team collaboration is becoming the norm.