Business has changed dramatically over the past decade. Costs have been rising. That means that businesses, just like everyone else, have to pay more for everything. This creates a situation where they may need to scale back on some things and not be as aggressive as was once possible. One way that most businesses can get around this is by investing in collaboration. Luckily for them, technology has been getting more collaborative. Let’s take a look at three ways collaboration has found its way into business.
Productivity
The most important part of collaboration is that people are able to work together to accomplish a singular goal; and fortunately for all of us, software developers identified this years ago. For a while now, the predominant productivity suites have come with real-time collaboration. This means that multiple people can contribute on a database, on a document, on a presentation, all at once. This built-in collaboration not only can make things move a touch faster, it can also give a tremendous amount of insight into the people you have working for you. The more you know about your employees, the easier it is to manage them. The better they’re managed, the more productive the whole team will be.
Communication
Communication has long been integral to collaboration. Without consistent communication, who would know what needs to be done or what has been done? Communications can have the opposite effect on collaborative outcomes, of course, and for that reason, it is important for an organization to have communications tools that push collaborative efforts toward positive outcomes rather than wasteful and costly ones. To accomplish this there are new “collaboration tools” which integrate video conferencing (often with VoIP integrated), instant messaging, and a forum type-platform that gives a whole organization a way to manage tasks, services, and projects.
Development
Developing a business that makes money and doesn’t crash and burn at the first sign of adversity is hard, hard work. That’s why it is essential to have a solid business development program going on. Most SMBs don’t have a dedicated department that does only this, they typically depend on decision-makers working through the data the business creates to come up with strategies to lead the business forward in prosperity. Since it takes input from every department to make decisions on how policy and procedures are created, businesses set up business intelligence and business analytics platforms to help them track how their current processes are working and give them the underlying information to make strategic changes at a business.
At Excedeo, we work with businesses that, just like your organization, need the years of experience that our technicians have accrued putting together technology strategies that improve collaboration and build high degrees of efficiency, productivity, and security. Give us a call today for more information.