'Ecosystem Collaboration Will Dominate The Future'

Shalini Verma, Research Manager-APAC, Communications Research, IDC, shares a microscopic view of collaboration in today’s age.

Please talk about the evolution of collaboration and its next-gen phase.

If you look within businesses, collaboration was initially about being in a particular place, going into a physical meeting room and collaborating over there. What really happened was the disintegration of businesses, leading to business processes being shifted to different geographies. That’s where the challenge happened. And then business people had to look at voice and Web applications to collaborate better. From a physical collaboration, we moved into the world of messaging and the Web to collaborate in a virtual way.

One of the main challenges arose from the fact that people were working in different time zones, so getting them on a single platform and making it easy for these dispersed teams to actually work together was a task. Now, we are moving into an era, where we are looking at newer technologies such as social media, visual collaboration, and more immersive technologies such as 3D virtual workspaces.

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Has collaboration become a business imperative?

Collaboration has always been important but now with the complex interactions and the way businesses are set up (they are often dispersed across geographies), it is a must. The sourcing models have changed. Because of these complexities, it has become even more important to collaborate. Then comes the element of customer expectations. In B2C models, where customers are much more demanding, collaboration plays an important role. The competitive measures are so daunting that there is no other way but to collaborate.

Which directions do you see collaboration expanding in?

There are three broad areas in which I see collaboration happening. One is internal or enterprise-centric collaboration, where internal groups collaborate. The second one is collaborating with your customer, so you are outwardly faced. Essentially, we call this customer interaction. The third is collaboration at the ecosystem level, where in a B2B model, there is collaboration happening across the supply chain. You can look at an extended platform to actually do that. For instance, when you are looking at telepresence and disparate companies, not just within a company but maybe two companies integrating a system, or using something like a telecom exchange hub to actually plug into a system to collaborate.

I believe that we haven’t reached a saturation point where we can say that internal collaboration is a done deal so let’s move on to the next level. We will continue to see the adoption of all these three elements. If you look into the distant future, then definitely B2B or ecosystem collaboration will be some thing that individual companies will focus on. But before that, they need to get their internal collaboration and customer-centric collaboration right.

Is collaboration helping CIOs to do more with less?

Collaboration definitely empowers CIOs to do more with less. It allows individuals to be more productive, dispersed groups can come together and work on a particular project. It allows you to use your communication budget more efficiently. This is what enterprises are looking at, if at all they would like to opt for collaboration, as it has to pass through their metrics of improvement in efficiency and how they use resources.