The Value of Creating Simple and Seamless Collaboration

Executive Summary

One of the biggest challenges organizations face today is keeping up with the fast pace of change. Everyone and everything seems to be moving at a very fast pace. Business typically runs round the clock, and today’s workforce is globally dispersed across various time zones, making it difficult for teams to put their heads together.

When we finally do schedule a time where everyone can meet, we must make the most of our meetings. Many work environments include remote employees and all are expected to be more collaborative than ever. This ever present expectation means that often there are multiple people sharing and engaging in meetings from various locations. We need to build solutions that help people connect and participate simply without the added burden of figuring out a complex technology. Collaboration in today’s virtual business landscape simply needs to work – that’s the current benchmark for effective collaboration.

In this white paper, we will explore the state of collaboration in today’s evolving workplace; talk about the common challenges of collaboration and how we can overcome them; and further, we will take a look at the Christie Brio solution as a potent answer to key collaboration  challenges and discover how it is driving better collaboration for enterprises.

Collaboration in the New Workplace: An Overview

It’s no secret that the workplace is continuously evolving. Traditional, centralized, homogenous, and brick-and-mortar organizations are giving way to increasingly dispersed, diverse, and virtually-operated businesses. Employees are no longer confined to their cubicles; they are working remotely from satellite locations and teleworking from home offices. Understandably, quite a bit has changed in the way we work and communicate.

The new business landscape is dynamic, fast-paced, and always “on,” and while the need for collaboration between dispersed teams has grown exponentially, it has also become more challenging than ever. As people toggle between meetings, co-ordinate with widely distributed teams, exchange ideas, documents, and try to overcome geographical limitations, the need for more effective collaboration solutions has emerged. Organizations are realizing quickly and investing in a wide range of collaboration tools. As a result, the enterprise collaboration market is expanding rapidly.

TechNavio predicts the global enterprise collaboration market will grow at a CAGR of 9.4 percent over the period 2014-2019. In a similar estimation, Research and Markets has stated that the global enterprise collaboration market is likely to grow from $47.30 billion in 2014 to $70.61 billion in 2019. Reports from Statista also show phenomenal growth (see right).

Are organizations equipped to create the required collaborative environment? Not really. Many of them are failing to capitalize on their investments because making a collaboration tool available in the organization does not guarantee that it will be adopted and used by employees. If a tool is introduced with the sole aim of improving productivity, as opposed to making the job of the employees easier,
people won’t use it.

Organizations need to stop wasting their resources on solutions that don’t work. They need to understand that collaboration isn’t what it used to be, neither are employees. Today’s employees already have a proclivity towards collaborating, thanks to social media. In fact, this is the reason why they expect the same level of simplicity and seamlessness from their collaborative tools at work. Organizations are challenged to provide their employees with collaboration tools that are spontaneous and can be integrated into their work lives seamlessly.

 Enterprise Collaboration Needs to be Simple and Seamless

The dispersed nature of today’s workplace requires employees to put forth more effort to stay connected, well-informed, and productive. Employees are consuming large amounts of data and information in the process of interacting with their teams and clients. With this mountain of data growing by 35-50% annually in most organizations (MIT Sloan Management Review), it’s just a matter of time before the
deluge of information becomes too much to take in. As workplaces become more and more competitive, employees demand their tools have smoother capabilities so that they can work faster and better. Simple and seamless collaboration comes into play here: tools live AV integrations allow users to collaborate with anyone, from anywhere, and at any time, knocking down all possible barriers to communication.

Effective Collaboration offers major payoffs in the form of faster results, educated decisions, and boosted productivity. But, for collaboration to be effective in the new workplace, it needs to address the challenges of remote communication while producing the results that conventional, face-to-face communication brings. Adopting a strategy that incorporates voice and video with easy-to-use tools will
win the day.

Across the world, remote teams are required to interact on an ongoing, uninterrupted basis. The goal is to allow them to collaborate in the same way that they would if they were in the same room. In a way, it should be as easy as walking to the next cubicle, even if the person is actually quite a few time-zones away. Moreover, the high engagement of collaboration solutions will keep remote employees motivated and foster team-building.

Formal collaboration sessions can be sometimes be more disruptive than productive. For instance, when employees have to rush to meeting rooms for scheduled meetings, productivity takes a beating. Seamless collaboration with video solutions, on the other hand, saves precious time and improves work-flow because they are more aligned to the natural work-flow of individual employees. It’s more spontaneous, faster, and intuitive collaboration that boosts productivity from get-go. Collaboration tools that enable seamless collaboration without the use of complex technology will meet the organization’s goals while giving employees an incentive to embrace such tools – a simple and no-frills solution that gets their job done.

Roadblocks to Simple and Seamless Collaboration

Studies have found that companies that have effective and secure collaboration systems in place can bring innovative products to market quickly, improve operating efficiency, increase customer loyalty, and drive more revenue in sales. However, many organizations struggle to build effective collaboration environments that help them achieve their business goals. According to estimations, nearly 80% of enterprise
collaboration initiatives fail for a number of reasons. What makes it hard for companies to create environments conducive to more effective, seamless, and simpler collaboration? Here are some of the biggest roadblocks in deployment of effective collaboration solutions within an organization:

Not having a proper strategy for collaboration.

Most organizations often introduce collaboration solutions without a proper strategy. This face-it-as-it-comes attitude doesn’t work in the long run, especially today when technology is changing faster than ever and requirements are likely to scale up or down at random speed. Without a plan, organizations are frequently left grappling with whatever solution they have to meet a particular need. And often, the solution isn’t the best one. Not only that, businesses that don’t have a proper plan for deploying collaboration solutions are more likely to make useless investments on tools and solutions they don’t need.

Focusing on technology, rather than on people and process.

Most organizations make the common mistake of giving almost 80% of their attention to technology, and only 20% of their attention to the people who use it and what they use it for, accounting for some of the major problems in collaboration tech adoption. Adoption lags if it fails to deliver according to the users’ expectations. Therefore, rather than looking for a silver bullet in the technology, organizations should focus on the specific problems for employees and how technology can provide the solution.

Addressing the need for ad-hoc collaboration.

It’s important for a collaboration solution to meet the requirements of ad-hoc communication as part of everyday productivity for dispersed teams. When collaboration becomes as easy as making a phone call, it results in significantly better outcomes. Improved productivity, better resolutions of problems, quicker decision-making, and more quality engagement between teams, client, and consultants are just some of the benefits of ad-hoc collaboration solutions.

Finding simple-to-use enterprise-grade collaboration solution.

With trends like BYOD witnessing widespread adoption, employees are not only using their personal devices to do their office work, but they are also using many free and easy-to-use applications to collaborate internally as well as externally. While applications like Hightail, SendSpace, or DropBox offer simpler and faster sharing of files and documents, they do carry high security risks since there is virtually no
control over what goes out of the organization and where it goes. For example,  DropBox support documentation says: “other users can’t see your files in DropBox unless you deliberately share links to files or share folders.” However, accidental sharing could lead to leakage and breaches of security.

Organizations need to offer their employees business-grade collaboration solutions that are safe and simple-to-use, to discourage them from using less-secure means, thus jeopardizing the privacy and security of their organization. So while collaboration needs to be as easy as a phone call, also it needs to have multi-layered security to prevent the risks of data leaks that can cost an organization in terms of revenue, value, and reputation.

Deploying the right combination of secure and simple collaboration solutions is complex issue that most organizations find hard to nail down. The Christie Brio Solution is a collaboration power-tool that helps organizations bridge the gap between seamlessness and security.

Christie Brio Solutions: The Power to Do More with Simple and Seamless Collaboration

Christie Brio presentation and collaboration solutions are designed to address common meeting, classroom, and lab technology challenges. Christie Brio solutions allow work colleagues, remote teams, and teleworkers to wirelessly present, share, and interact with each other – within the same room or across multiple locations, in real-time. Enabling teams to exchange ideas easily and seamlessly, it puts everyone’s focus back where it should be – on the content of the meeting, leaving technology to do its work in the background.

Supporting Secured Collaboration

BYOD has become the premier collaboration choice for most employees since it allows them to use the device they are most comfortable with. It not only positively impacts their productivity, but also makes collaboration seamless and a lot simpler for them. But what is convenient for employees can be an IT department’s nightmare, since using unsecured devices to handle sensitive data can push an organization towards high security risks. With Christie Brio solutions, organizations can set up an infrastructure that allows people to use the devices they prefer in a
collaboration session, without putting the organization’s security at risk. Christie Brio has security features like secure wireless access points, wirelessly protected meetings, multiple levels of security, and robust encryption that allows employees to collaborate in the most spontaneous manner without having to worry about security.

Making Simple Collaboration a Reality

Christie Brio solutions offer user interface that enables organizations to rearrange source layouts, control audio, initiate whiteboard and annotation, enable remote collaboration, and more advanced functions – all in one simple way. The result is collaborative sessions that can begin spontaneously and almost immediately. With its fast-to-connect facilities, Brio presents great opportunities for ad-hoc communications. Moreover Brio doesn’t require any special software; it uses software that is built into the computer. For instance, Microsoft users can wirelessly connect with BRIO using the in-built network projector. For Apple users, BRIO can stream up to 5 AirPlay streams. Not only that, using Brio, connecting with an ongoing meeting is as easy as sending a request from the address book.

Ensuring High Quality Collaboration

Christie Brio solutions provide a high audio and video experience, allowing participants to enjoy a seamless and effective collaboration, while eliminating the common problems related to bad audio and video quality.

In terms of a superior content viewing experience, Christie Brio offers the most interactive collaboration experience by turning touch panels into shared whiteboard and annotation tools. All participants, irrespective of location, can add to or edit content, images and video in real-time using various writing, drawing tools, and touch-enabled displays. Whiteboard drawings can be saved and distributed to participants across the network, or recalled for later editing.

With this enhanced collaboration, people can walk into a room and start connecting – that’s the power of wireless connectivity that Christie Brio brings to the table.