A quick google search on the state of collaboration in the workplace will provide you with some pretty staggering data points on the perception of how we all collaborate.

39% of surveyed employees believe that people in their own organization don’t collaborate

86% of employees and executives site lack of collaboration or ineffective communication for workplace failures

Now do a search for Conferencing or Collaboration technologies which is supposed to improve collaboration. You will find some 42,000 collaboration products and services!

Whether you already use collaboration services or not, you need to make sure they are the right ones for your organization.

With over 19 collaboration solutions that provide the top performance in their respective categories, Momentum Conferencing experts are able to inform you about the technologies and tools that achieve what you need.

Have your own assessment completed here: Collaboration Technology Assessment

Are you saying collaboration technology doesn’t work?

Of course not! Cleary at Momentum Conferencing we believe that Mickey Mouse Bounce House Slide Collaboration Technology can greatly improve overall teamwork and collaboration within an organization.  Often times the issues reside within the user base and their resistance to change or challenges in adopting new technology.

We offer some suggestions for improving adoption in a recent blog post: An Open Letter to IT Leaders Who Have Recently Invested in Skype for Business

Assessment Step 1: What’s working and what’s not (and what are people complaining about)

We start by trying to understand what the issues actually are and what the perceived issues are within the organization.

With new deployments of any technology the perceived issues can be the biggest hurdle even though there is nothing wrong with the technology or the implantation.

Some things we look for:

The internal/external divide:  All collaboration tools work perfectly within your organization but you struggle with external participants including customers.

Integration between services: If none of your services talk to one another than you are going to have issues and confusion within your user base.

In a perfect world, does it do what everyone needs/wants: Not that we live in a utopia where every technology deployment does everything that everyone wants, but if cost and other technical limitations were not on the table does your current suite of collaboration technology do exactly what you need it to?

Assessment Step 2: Are you taking care of the top 20% of your users

I once had a customer from a major accounting firm in Canada who was a project manager. He worked out of his home on Victoria Island and was in charge of implementing technology across the organization.

This guy had permission to work with our company as he was a power user who was literally on conference calls and web-meetings all day.

He had some specific needs to allow him to manage his busy schedule, which included some things the corporate provider could not accommodate. He wasn’t being taken care of.

Identifying your power users and their specific needs is very important.

Almost all collaboration products have power user bundles that provide enhanced features and fixed costs to allow you to better empower this specific group while ensuring you contain the costs they drive up!

Assessment Step 3:  Integrations, Apps and all that fun stuff

All third party collaboration services (or most anyway) provide more features than you are aware of including mobile apps, integration with existing technology and even API’s for data flow and administration.

These items are often not talked about as the procurement process of collaboration platforms so often focuses on costs and checking off user requirement’s from a spreadsheet!

When we have these discussions we can make a good determination if the existing stack is right for your organization based on the other technology infrastructure you have invested so heavily in.

If so, these integrations and API’s will generally improve adoption as every piece of your collaboration stack will be easier to use driving better adoption and ROI.

A few questions to ask yourself:

• Do your external webinars integrate with your Marketing Automation and CRM for improved lead flow?
• Do your collaboration platforms integrate seamlessly with your telephony, UC platforms?
• Are you able to administer your own user accounts?
• Do you have security integration in place to ensure your internal communications stay internal to your employee base?
• Do your desktops talk to your video conference rooms or external video endpoints seamlessly?

Assessment Step 4: Cost Models

When I started in this business everything came down to the rate per minute!

The average rate per minute at that time was .15/min/line for simple North American toll free audio conferencing. So a lot has changed as the world has changed.

The question of cost reduction has turned to cost containment and the nuances of how you do this have gotten more complicated.

Understanding where all the costs come from is a big part of the assessment and ours will generally reduce your overall spend by 25%.

If you are interested in how we complete the assessment you can get started here: Collaboration Technology Assessment