The rising tide of online collaboration is highlighted by a new infographic. But why are businesses finally turning to online collaboration tools?
Most businesses know that online social collaboration tools can form part of the solution to inefficient working practices, but they’ve been around for ages and, for various hotly discussed reasons, never seem to have caught on.
Until, now, it seems
According to a recent McKinsey Report office workers spend an average of 28 hours a week writing emails, searching for information and collaborating internally.
Apparently, most of us prefer to use email rather than actually speak to a colleague, resulting in companies like Debenhams having to store 13.8 million new emails a month - a figure that’s increasing 20% year on year for the retailer.
Clinked.com, a UK-based business collaboration start-up, has just published an infographic (below) which states that 75% of businesses say online collaboration tools will be “important” or “somewhat important” to their business during the next 12 months.
Clinked's founder, Tayfun Bilsel, says his team has noticed a shift in attitudes during 2012:
We used to spend half our time educating clients about the benefits of social collaboration. These days, businesses are approaching us with clearly defined strategies for reducing overheads and connecting remote working teams. The market has grown up.
These sentiments echo those of Aaron Levie, CEO of Box.com, who described how start-ups offering freemium, cloud-based solutions that also work across mobile have “exploded the size of the [enterprise collaboration] market”.
The rapid emergence (and acquisition) of start-ups in this scene is testament to the size of the opportunity. Box.com itself recently took another $125m in investment. It's a rapidly emerging industry, and as Forrester understated somewhat in a recent White Paper “there is a real and growing market demand for these tools”.
There are several theories as to why online collaboration tools are taking off. Firstly, there’s the recession, which is forcing businesses to do more with less including, in many cases, getting rid of the office and relying on shared working spaces for collaboration.
Secondly, with more than 1 billion people actively using Facebook, we’ve all become more familiar with news feeds, activity streams and @mentions – common features of enterprise social networks.
Lastly, the tools themselves have got better. Many now integrate with Google Drive, offer seamless synching with Google and Outlook calendars, have mobile apps and provide highly secure document storage. Most are easy to set up and use and come with simple monthly tariffs.
Now that it’s been put on plate for them, it seems businesses are finally taking to online collaboration.
Reader comments (6)
11:50AM on 30th October 2012
Social media has far more potential to change how organisations work than it ever does as a 'marketing' channel.
Hopefully more and more organisations will begin to use it for that and truly become social businesses.
8:28PM on 30th October 2012
Social collaboration and project mangagement platforms are definitely the way to go as you say. The sooner businesses actively adopt one of the many platforms and make it work for them, the better. It will increase productivity, reduce the need for endless emails and keep team members better informed on what is happening. Our team is spread over several time zones and would not function as efficently as we do if we did not use Tracky, www.tracky.com, a social collaboration and project management platform.
8:54AM on 2nd November 2012
'Recent'? That McKinsey report was out month's ago. There's a lot happening in the social business space that you guys seem to miss. It's not so much businesses that are waking up to this, but eConsultancy's turn to.
Russell
4:17PM on 5th November 2012
Social Media or Social Business..... lets face that businesses do not have the processes that could handle a sound internal social collaboration via IT (social collaboration though happens for decades in companies through talking i.e. during lunch-time).
Even less so do businesses have processes that would allow to socially engage with customers. And NO, online-contests and discount coupons for fans are NOT the core of social business or social interaction.
It is sad to see that people chase platforms as "solutiuons" for what must be a 100 percent self-grown solution with no external code involved for if not form the very own code-competence of the company, where should its IT supported social interactions and qualifications come from?????
You can't buy being a social business you have to GROW INTO BEING a social business.
9:28AM on 17th December 2012
Right on. Love the stats and the infographics. Moving forward I think what we will see is niche collaboration apps for specific industries. We are working on one right now. It is called brightpod.com and designed for marketing professionals and agencies in mind.
1:47AM on 26th March 2013
Good article but the stupid addon on the left of the article asking me to like or tweet this article is a pain it is blocking part of the writing.
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