Don’t forget collaboration in your branch office strategy

Collaboration tools are fast becoming a key requirement for a
successful branch office strategy

n By Irwin Lazar

When it comes to a branch office strategy most IT executives focus on the plumbing, ensuring that branch offices have reliable and acceptable network connectivity, application performance, and access to rapid troubleshooting services. But as enterprises become increasingly virtual, collaboration tools are emerging as a key requirement for a successful branch office strategy.

 

With over 83% of enterprises now considering themselves“virtual” according to the Nemertes Benchmark Building a Successful Virtual Workplace, the time has come for IT managers to address the requirements of the virtual workforce to collaborate regardless of location.

Collaboration tools are typically broken into real-time (e.g. Web, audio, and video conferencing as well as instant messaging) and non-real-time (e.g.blogs, wikis, and shared workspaces). Enterprises are moving rapidly along with deploying real-time services, with 96% of IT executives reporting at least one tool in use. But adoption of some non-real-time collaboration tools lags, with only with only 23% of enterprises using blogs and 37% using wikis. Sixty-five percent of enterprises have deployed some form of shared workspaces, but often tools are inconsistently deployed across the organization.

What’s more, most organizations lack an enterprise-wide collaboration strategy, and only 45% have settled on a strategic enterprise collaboration vendor. The lack of a strategic vendor isn’t in and of itself troubling as it could indicate that enterprises simply deploy best-of-breed solutions from a variety of vendors. However, our research indicates that the real reason for the lack of a strategic vendor is that individual business

units and workgroups are making their own collaboration tool decisions, leading to an environment where documents and data reside in numerous, non-integrated systems, or they aren’t buying anything at all.

The reality for many organizations is that virtual workers often lack the tools to effectively collaborate and communicate, in many cases relying on inefficient applications such as e-mail, without capabilities for group communication, knowledge sharing, and project management.

The lesson for enterprise IT managers is to move up-stack, consider not only the connectivity needs of your branch office workers, but their productivity needs as well. Develop a collaboration and communication strategy that leverages emerging applications to improve the effectiveness of your virtual workforce.