Collaboration in Dynamic Enterprises
Dynamic enterprises are continuously evolving and involve process and policy changes due to changing environments, work culture and diverse teams situated in different geographies. These type of enterprises have changing hierarchies of roles and responsibilities. Roles of a particular employee vary from team member to manager with different projects in hand. Then, it becomes very difficult to get a clear picture of the projects, their teams and its members, tasks assigned and accomplished. Also it is difficult to search for the members with sepcific skill if hte project is large. Such type of complex organizations are very large in number now, and, existing enterprises are also looking towards this kind of enterprise architecture. They are reducing the role hierarchy in their teams and employing persons with mutliple skills. So, to have a clear picture of any project / work going on, the Project Manager and Teams members both require transparency in terms of tasks being assigned and completed. Also they should be able to collaborate fast within their teams and outside also. The team members with multiple projects in hand should be able to switch to different projects quickly and get information related to its progress, team and tasks.
The main issues faced by these organizations are:
- Information overload and lack of contextual information.
- Coordination between distributed team members.
- Knowledge Management between teams and team members.
- Collaboration limited with Phone lines, Emails and Instant Messengers.
- Level of Hierarchy increasing and becoming complex.
- Regulatory compliance for distributed teams and work done.
Due to the above issues, there is a negative reflection of productivity and high costs within enterprise and it becomes very complex to manage information collected and attributed by each team member. Also the management and milestone progress of these teams is difficult for their managers. If not properly collaborated, team members loose a vision of the work they do and this reflects in their delivarables.
On the other hand, emails are the primary source of communication for any enterprise. Project managememnt tools are limited to milestone and task setting, they do not provide a collective view of distributed team, formal and informal communication. Also when too many enterprise have distributed teams, all need a media for social communication within an enterprise.
If tons of documents are upload to portal without any context and are present in their emails, employees suffer from information overload. To find the relevant and contextual information from a large set of data costs a comany time and money. The support system / collaboration tools that an employee uses should have the capability to find and show information that is relevant to employee.
These all factors contribute in personal productivity of employee and eventually revenue per employee of an enterprise.
If we provide a tool / framework with collaborative environs, which saves distributed employee from team exclution, information overload and lack of transparency, then productivity of an employee can be increased. This framework can also be build on existing collaboration tools such as Microsoft SharePoint. Such tools also ensure Knowledge Management, Contextual Information and easy Team Management. The tool / framework can have below features:
It should have also the capability to integrate with existing infrastructure and applications, thus enabling enterprise information search. Thus today's Dynamic Enterprise need a comprehensive architecture for employee and team collaboration. This will surely reflect in the revenues of the enterprise as increase in:
