Collaboration Under Enterprise Content Management
Collaboration allows groups to work together. Group members might have expertise in different areas and can contribute different perspectives to solving the problem under discussion. This can lead to far better results compared to an individual working on the problem.
For example, in product design, while the engineer can do a preliminary design that can perform the basic function, the marketing person can suggest features to enhance its marketability, the cost accountant can make suggestions about the costs, a business law specialist can point to applicable safety regulations and so on.
If all the views are considered and acted upon where feasible, the final design would be an excellent product, say, a highly marketable, low cost and safe product that can out-compete existing products in the market.
Collaboration Tools in ECM
Enterprise Content Management typically provides several tools for collaborative working, like instant messaging, virtual project spaces, whiteboarding and Web conferencing facilities. These facilities allow collaboration among individuals irrespective of their location.
Even time constraints can be overcome by using tools like discussion forums that allow users to view the current status of discussions on a particular topic or aspect and contribute their views at their own convenience.
The collaboration exercise can be made more structured if considered necessary. Structuring starts with a clear idea of what needs to be done to achieve team goals and who is to do what. With these clear ideas, a plan to use the available collaboration tools most effectively can be developed.
We look at the tools in a little more detail below.
- Shared Workspaces are virtual electronic meeting places where members of a team can make presentations using audio, video and graphics. They can also access and interact with the documents on the workspace
- Discussion forums allow users to review and contribute to discussions on topics of interest to them. Unlike Web meetings, discussion forums allow the users to review and post at times of their own convenience. Threaded discussion under which an original post and responses to it are presented as a continuous thread makes it easy to review the whole debate or discussion
- Instant messaging is a real time conversation among persons separated by short or vast distances. Unlike emails, which might remain unanswered for long periods, IM enables immediate to and fro communications
- Web conferencing technology enables not only group meetings of persons located all around the world but also makes it possible to conduct online seminars open to a worldwide audience. Webinars can be highly useful for customer relations, business partner education and employee training. Conferencing products could come with features such as multimedia presentation facilities, online polling, wikis, blogs, discussion forums and instant messaging
- Wikis are websites where users can add, delete and edit content. They also typically contain links to other sites, which users can refer to clearly understand the terms used in the wiki. Wikis are ideal to tap into the knowledgebase of employees, business partners and others. Marketing personnel could use them to share up-to-date market developments and other information. They are also ideal to share best practices among co-workers.
The above tools, and others like search facilities and podcasts, and carefully developed collaboration routines, make collaborative working between remotely located team members a regular and highly productive feature of organizational functioning.
What Does Collaborative Working Achieve?
Collaborative working using the tools available in modern Enterprise Content Management systems, as outlined in the last section, provide benefits like the following:
- Workers can work together across widely separated distances, in a meaningful way
- Costs are saved because employee travel expenses are reduced
- Projects can be completed quicker as workers can track status of different tasks online (even from the field)
- Productivity increases when there are more interactions across departments, business processes, and even organizations
- With even customers and suppliers in the loop of online communications, customer relationships and supply management can be improved, with consequent benefits in sales volumes and production levels
Collaborative working is essential in a team endeavor like running a business. The more it can be improved, the better business results could be. However, collaboration is usually not a structured process, like business processes. It tends to be ad hoc and unstructured in practice. Enterprise Content Management systems offer several collaboration tools and with a little planning, the collaboration exercise can be made a structured process with definite goals.