5 Predictions for the Future of Collaboration
How many of you use Facebook? LinkedIn? Twitter? Do you believe that your ideas get stronger when you share them with others? Collaboration enables us to connect with experts and people with like-minded interests.
The tools we use to link people, information and communities are evolving at lightening speed. That’s especially true in these turbulent economic times, as organizations aim to do more with less. Business leaders and IT decision-makers alike recognize that collaboration is a way to boost productivity and gain competitive advantage within tight budget constraints.
Given the rapid pace of change and our industry leadership, what is Cisco’s vision for Collaboration?
Well in the spirit of Collaboration, I want to share my ideas with you! Throughout the week I will post my top “predictions” for the future of Collaboration. I am looking forward to hearing back from you, as we build this vision together.
Prediction #1
Collaboration Networks will be to Enterprises what Social Networks are to Consumers
It’s an understatement to say that social networking is a rapidly growing consumer phenomenon. Twitter’s recent surge in popularity is just one small indicator. Visits to Twitter have increased about 1,400 percent since last year. Meanwhile, Facebook has seen a 566% surge from December 2007 to December 2008, surpassing 200 million users worldwide (Nielsen). It’s worth noting that 35- to 44-year olds now represent 51 percent of FaceBook’s membership, and 70 percent of FaceBook’s users are now located outside the U.S (Hitwise).
Driving this explosive growth is a natural human tendency to build relationships. We instinctively seek to share information, broadcast our preferences and contribute our expertise. The goal of technology must be to fulfill this human affinity as naturally as possible.
So how does this translate to the business world?
At Cisco, we believe that the rigidly structured silos that were traditionally put in place in most enterprises will give way to more fluid, ad-hoc communities of experts. Increasingly, companies will rely on Collaboration Networks that bring together “clusters of experts” to get critical projects completed. These groups will form dynamically to achieve a shared outcome. This self-organizing cycle repeats itself on an ongoing basis, as the need arises. It’s both efficient and effective, in part because experts are drawn to projects and are thus motivated — rather than being “assigned” in a top-down fashion.
Here’s just one example of a collaboration network: About 17% of Cisco’s employees use Macs, even though the Mac platform is not officially supported by Cisco IT. Responding to the need at hand, members of the community developed a comprehensive Mac wiki that provides critical self-support for this base of users. The wiki has enabled Cisco to avoid approximately $1.6M in annual help-desk costs while improving productivity and increasing uptime. In total, this wiki has delivered an estimated $2.6M in value annually for Cisco.
As collaboration networks evolve and proliferate, our challenge as an industry is clear. We need to develop Enterprise Collaboration Platforms that provide the same ease of use, speed and ubiquity that social networks offer in the consumer world. But we need to combine those qualities with the high level of security, availability, quality of service, and reliability that enterprises require.
Prediction #2
Prediction #3
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Prediction #5
Posted by Padmasree Warrior at 05:36PM PST
) will come out of this shift in people’s thinking rather than the technology itself.
samuel hu Apr 20, 2009
social networking is very important,Enterprise Collaboration Platforms is very necessary