Collaboration to drive business

Collaboration is the key driver in business performance for global IT decision makers, a study conducted by Frost & Sullivan concludes.

The report titled, ‘Meetings Around the World: The Impact of Collaboration on Business Performance’ was sponsored by Microsoft and Verizon Business and conducted in March.

The study defines collaboration as an interaction between culture and technology such as audio and web conferencing, email and instant messaging.

It found the impact of collaboration was twice as significant as a company’s aggressiveness in pursuing new market opportunities and five times as significant as the external market environment.

The study also showed that a global culture of collaboration exists, but that there were regional differences in how people in various countries prefer to communicate with one another.

Frost & Sullivan examined the nature and extent of collaboration that allows people to work together, as well as an organisation’s culture and processes that encourage teamwork.

The study found the high impact of collaboration on a company’s overall performance was consistent across the US, Europe and Asia-Pacific.

It was also consistent across six key vertical industries examined, healthcare, government, high technology, professional services, financial services and manufacturing.

The report also found a 9:1 ratio existed of people who saw their collaborative efforts as highly productive and believed that collaboration through communication technologies provides a personal competitive advantage, keeps them informed and positions them to take advantage of new opportunities.

However many like to work with teams, 10:1 like to work from home and 3:1 felt face-to-face wasn’t necessary.

Frost & Sullivan also found 5:1 feel that conferencing provides a good alternative to travel. Many like to be reached wherever they were (2:1), but not necessarily all the time (9:1), which may be one of the reasons why email was preferred to using the phone (3:1).

Three collaboration technologies were more commonly present in high-performing companies than in low-performing ones, said the report.

Web conferencing, audio conferencing and meeting-scheduler technologies were cited by respondents as the most common tools used.

The “Meetings Around the World” study surveyed 946 IT and line-of-business decision-makers from a cross section of 2,000 small-to-medium, mid-market and global companies.

These companies were based in the United States, Europe (France, Germany and the United Kingdom) and Asia-Pacific (Australia, Hong Kong and Japan).

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