Business Collaboration Is A Familiar Buzz Word
Business Collaboration is one of the most often used buzzwords in the technology industry. You hear it all the time, online collaboration, peer-to-peer collaboration, collaborative software and business collaboration. What does it mean? Particularly what does it mean to businesses?
Business collaboration means getting the lead out and working with others, either within your own business or in other businesses to achieve a goal. Which raises an interesting question. What benefits are businesses really getting from business collaboration?
Well, there's not much in the way of benefits if the business collaboration is one sided and not on a daily basis. Projects based on business collaboration don't get done over night by one person, they get done (in an ideal business collaboration model) by many.
If what's on the table in discussions between two businesses is business collaboration on a project that will make them both look good, they need to be looking for collaboration software to make the project happen. This may be a difficult thing to achieve any degree of consensus on, as collaborative software comes in many different flavors. Also up for discussion will no doubt be the definition of collaboration. While business collaboration will likely harness such things as instant messaging, email and web conferencing, these things are not collaboration technologies. They are communication tools. Period. The collaboration begins when teams working together develop objectives around communication, and create some structure. Call it the great debate between structured and unstructured business collaboration. On the other end of the scale is the point of view that communication is the real beginning of true business collaboration. Collaboration takes on a life of its own when lots of people communicate with each other simultaneously and use structures and workflows. This is opposed to using one-to-one or one-to-many e-mail features. So while it seems that many agree that business collaboration will bring everyone involved many benefits, no one seems to quite know how to go about achieving it. Nor can they decide what type of business collaboration software to implement within their organizations. It is obvious that business collaboration with others in remote locations will have financial benefits - such as a reduction in phone bills. In actuality it's likely the most powerful benefits will be as a result of collaborative communication tools being layered over business processes to produce true business collaboration. Up until now collaboration tools aren't being used much due to the fact that potential users are reluctant to use them. The easier these tools get to use, the greater their role will be in promoting corporate/business collaboration.
Knowledge Management
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