Capabilities

The goal of enterprise collaboration can be succinctly described as connecting the right people with the right information or expertise at the right time to drive the right business decision, something that will increasingly distinguish the winners from the losers in today’s dynamic knowledge-based economy.

The problem is the goal, and the long-term promise of enterprise collaboration, has up until now been somewhat elusive.

In any enterprise, teams, whole departments, and increasingly an extended network of partners, suppliers and customers, have to interact and collaborate in order to get things done.

But the data with which they work takes many forms – ranging from highly structured and orderly to unstructured and the ad hoc – and while many enterprises do a good job of handling structured data they fail at managing the flood of uncontrolled and unstructured data.

Essentially, this is about cohesively managing two different kinds of information: one being data-driven information or the management of documents and files, and the other being people-driven information, which is collaborative in nature and includes emails, chats, conferences, blogs and other social media.

Together these two quite different types of information form the very strategic fabric of the enterprise, and in this increasingly complex world, the more effectively they can be flexibly integrated and managed as a single resource end-to-end, the more it transforms the enterprise’s decision making processes and competitiveness.

Achieving the gains of enterprise collaboration however, has its challenges. First, it’s important organisations, large and small, define the right organisation-wide strategy. Second, the frenetic and exponential growth of unstructured and hard-to-find data has to be strategically managed, and third, capturing and leveraging the right expertise from within the organisation, for there is a crucial distinction which always has to be considered: that collaboration is as much about people, communication and culture as it is about technology.

With extensive experience of structured information processes and the power of integrated change management programs, Oakton helps companies successfully build enterprise collaborative solutions, delivering tangible operating performance improvements and achieving competitive advantage through the intelligent and targeted marriage of existing technologies, mobile technologies and social software tools.

To find out more about Oakton’s work in this area please contact Matt Chessell, Sam Bradon , Howard Sachs or Jan Esman.