Discussion
Today communication technology is changing rapidly helping businesses to perform more effectively, productively, smarter and faster. Luckily, many vendors are ready to offer a series of collaboration technologies for improvement of performance of the company. Collaboration technology is not only about better information and knowledge sharing among employees of the company it’s about enhancement of business's effectiveness.
This point is covered in the article “How collaboration technologies are improving a process, workforce, and business performance” by Hamilton, Kass, & Alter (2013). According to 2013 Avanade survey, 77% of decision makers use different collaboration technology and about 82% of executives using such technologies plan to use them even more (Hamilton, Kass, & Alter, 2013). The idea highlighted in the article is that collaboration technologies should serve not only for better information and knowledge exchange but also contribute to better work performance, better results, higher productivity and greater innovation. Hamilton, Kass, & Alter (2013) underline the importance of embedding technologies deep in company’s business processes, afterward forming the collaborative behaviors among employees that lead to results and, finally, they are talking about the importance of how talent is ‘sourced and deployed’ in the company.
Indeed, collaboration technologies, such as crowdsourcing tools like Spigit or Facebook-like platforms like Yammer or Chatter, are part and parcel of a successful business. The point is how effectively executives can use them for team collaboration work. It goes without saying that the result of the effectiveness of collaboration technologies use will depend on whether it is embedded into business with the view to better share information and knowledge or to increase the productivity of a company. Therefore, taking into account today’s high competitiveness among businesses, collaboration technologies play an important role in increasing chances of a company for success. A simple example confirms the necessity in the effective use of collaboration technology: employees of CEMEX’s alternative fuel programs managed to reduce CO2 emissions by approximately 2 million metric tons per year simply by sharing their ideas and experiences through the online platform. This allowed the company to save more than $140 million and earn $80 million in sales of CO2 credits (Hamilton, Kass, & Alter, 2013).
References
Hamilton, M., Kass, A., & Alter, A. E. (2013, December). How collaboration technologies are improving process, workforce and business performance. Retrieved September 06, 2016, from https://www.accenture.com/us-en/insight-outlook-how-collaboration-technologies-are-improving-process-workforce-business
