How to Navigate the Path to a More Collaborative FutureHow to Navigate the Path to a More Collaborative Future

In my many conversations with organizations both large and small, currently no question seems to conjure a greater variety of responses than: “What’s your strategy for collaboration?”

As technologists, answering in technological terms is tempting. Collaboration is UC, plus some bells and whistles. Or, collaboration is our productivity software, with added pizzazz.

However, ask your end users and you get a different answer. Collaboration isn’t a technology. It isn’t really even a solution. What it boils down to is workflows -- evolved specifically to get work done -- and everyone involved is motivated to reduce friction between the moving parts and individual contributors. These can include clients and customers, who are often spread across geographies and time zones.

To these people, any collaboration solution worth its salt needs to improve the workflows that most challenge them. It should eliminate bottlenecks, reduce human errors, remove complexity or shorten processes, and boost both transparency and flexibility. Better still if the tech gets out of the way, leaving the people with each other and the work. I’m giving away no secrets by pointing out that traditional UC and productivity vendors -- now doggedly positioning themselves as collaboration players -- are struggling to live up to those expectations.

For true inspiration, enterprise users look instead to consumer tech and the new collaboration entrants -- solutions that are easy-to-use, adaptable, quick to evaluate, simple to deploy, and cost effective. Their magic is in streamlining a workflow within a consistently beautiful user experience. Two or three apps with ready-made integrations can be genuinely transformational -- say, online co-authoring plus workgroup messaging and instant conferencing. Once everyone has experienced “better,” there’s no going back. That bar has been permanently raised.

Caught in the middle between warring incumbent vendors and resourceful, demanding end users is you -- the technical decision makers, architects, and service providers within enterprises. So, let’s look at some of the common collaboration dilemmas and some possible solutions -- informally crowd-sourced from folks like you.

My UC and enterprise productivity vendors have a collaboration app for everything, but aren’t great at anything. When and how do I embrace better alternatives?

Alright -- let’s not be ungenerous. Chances are your vendors are very good at their traditional solutions. You’re also clear about their enterprise credentials, in terms of availability, scale, compliance, and so on. There’s a lot to like. And you and they are keenly aware of the investment you’ve got tied up in them. But the state of the art is shifting faster than they can adapt. Their latest collaboration solution elements are more likely to be bought than built in-house, and may be no better integrated than a third-party application. That process of integration -- assimilation might be more accurate -- is painfully slow, and there are lots of examples where the simple and compelling purpose of the original application is lost en route.

Many large organizations have reached a tipping point and have created clear demarcation lines – “this far, and no further” -- for their traditional vendors. This in turn creates space for more agile and innovative cloud-enabled collaboration solutions. It’s pretty obvious to most new entrants that they need to integrate at that practical, workflow level with the big players and many do a good job of it. I know of one major U.S. retail chain that’s chosen Slack over Microsoft Teams for its workgroup messaging solution. And there are APIs that you can leverage to create further integrations of your own. In the best case though, your new-generation vendor will be willing and able to collaborate with you on the integrations that will make the biggest difference to your workflows.

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A one-size-fits-all, inflexible user interface never works.

Better workflows mean greater creativity, responsiveness, productivity, and all-around efficiency for workgroups or departments. And scaling those workflows across the business can make a major difference for the bottom line. However, it only works if the majority of employees come along on the journey.

Talking to people, singly and in groups, is still a huge part of any workflow, right? The younger and tech savvy will most likely eagerly adopt a comms app on a mobile device or laptop. Clicking to conference comes naturally. Other demographics will ask, “Why reinvent the telephone?” There’s no overall right or wrong.

It’s the same with messaging. Contextual or threaded messaging is a brilliant tool for creating and sustaining a conversation around an object, process, theme -- just about any context you like. For such a simple dish, the range of flavors is pretty surprising. Just when you think that all conceivable recipes have been explored, along comes another to sweep through the market. The list of ingredients on paper may look pretty similar, but the unique flavor comes out in the bake.

The learning point is that you don’t need to choose one flavor over another -- Slack over Microsoft Teams, for example. Instead, how about a flavor specifically cooked up for your business, your users, and your workflows? The winner is the solution that brings a dynamic and responsive user interface to collaboration so that everyone from age 18 to 70+ can leverage the same tool, catered to their workflows. Some just want to dial, others want to mostly text and do video calls, and others look to live in collaboration rooms. The point is that a single interface is in order, but it needs to bend to the unique requirements of the entire user base.

Hard versus soft; cloud versus on premises; fixed versus mobile

The consensus among enterprises is that the days of the desk phone, the on-premises PBX, and maybe even the telepresence suite are numbered. The greatest influencers here are changes in demographics and work patterns.

Maybe we should lay the blame on the tantalizing prospect of a Star Trek-style holodeck for the idea that we have to go to a special place, at an appointed time, for a virtual boardroom-style meeting in order to collaborate. I’m sure we’ve all experienced them -- and possibly watched in 8K detail as colleagues looked not at the camera, but instead gazed steadily at the mobile device in their laps, where the real work was getting done.

The point is that work is getting ever more flexible, distributed, and mobile, driven largely by changing expectations for the workplace and the nature of work as a whole. Everything about this new style of working points ultimately to mobility, the cloud, apps, and softphones on smart devices. Your challenge is how to get there on your terms.

Your peers tell me that you can freeze investment in still-useful, on-premises solutions or business critical infrastructure, and choose the cloud to pioneer innovative new collaboration options. Telephony is the classic case. With a number of the new collaboration solutions, it’s possible to integrate cloud-based conferencing and messaging with on-premises PBX in-house calling. With this approach, your compliance and continuity risks are mitigated. You can test and learn. And over time, the balance can shift until you meet all your needs from the cloud.

I earlier provided desk phones as an example of a touchpoint where a one-size user interface doesn’t fit all needs. The consensus is that it’s probably a waste of time to convince committed users to give up their desk phones. It’s definitely a waste of time to train millennials to use one. And there are many examples now of large enterprises going fully mobile and BYOD.

For instance, we’re working with large financial institutions that have enabled swaths of employees to communicate with colleagues and customers using only mobile devices. In these cases, the role prescribes the workflows, which determine the choice of tech. Throw into the mix employees working from home on Chromebooks or virtual endpoints, and you have yet another, different set of users with similar but not identical workflows.

These two newer deployment scenarios must work in conjunction with the old school, enterprise-based desktop deployments. However, that kind of elasticity can command a high cost. To help mitigate that, look to choose soft over hard – collaboration software that embraces all platforms with a consistent user experience – and prioritize cloud over on-premises deployments.

In summary, the path to collaboration nirvana can be tricky. The caretakers of the industry bringing solutions to market seem to be driving their own agendas of vertically integrating their own offerings instead of being inclusive of other solutions. On the other side, specialist vendors in one facet of collaboration are struggling to offer holistic solutions that meet an enterprise’s broad needs. Fortunately, for today’s users, the best path forward can come through offerings that combine the entire sphere of communications and collaboration solutions in a dynamic and customizable user experience.