Digital Collaboration

In increasingly service-based economies, information is the vital asset and collaboration engine that generates value from this asset.

Collaboration also is fundamental to maximize the opportunity created by globalization through access to new markets and the potential to optimize workforces, supply chains and distribution channels.

And, we believe, collaboration plays a pivotal role in enabling an enterprise to become best-of-breed. In today's ultra-competitive business environment, enterprises need to achieve and sustain a best-of-breed position in order to survive and thrive. The specific path to becoming best-of-breed will vary by industry sector and the specific circumstances of individual enterprises, but there are several factors that are fundamental to achieving a best-of-breed position. These factors are enabled and improved by collaboration:

• Innovation: New and improved products and processes increase organic growth and operating leverage. Collaboration among employees (and third-parties) generates ideas and reduces the cycle time for innovation.
• Customer Relationships: Collaboration with customers to create truly customer-driven products and services increases sales and customer loyalty.
• Supplier, Channel Partner Relationships: Synchronization and quality control of suppliers and channel partners to manage and optimize the customer experience end-to-end.
• Stakeholder Relationships: Richer interactions with the increasing number of external stakeholders to whom an organization is accountable (investors, regulators, local communities et cetera).
• Employee Empowerment: Organizations need to attract high-skilled employees in an environment where they will be in short supply for the considerable future. A workplace that allows employees to participate in dynamic project teams, active communities of interest and an environment of continuous learning is a tangible differentiator for an employer.
• Operations Efficacy: Speed and quality of executing the core business processes of the organization.

Avanade believes that information technology is essential to enabling enterprises to build a collaborative environment and realize these benefits. Specifically, digital collaboration—the use of technologies to allow efficient and valuable connections among people and information—is critical to becoming an innovative company, to establishing high-value relationships with customers, partners, suppliers, and stakeholders; to attracting and retaining a highly skilled workforce; and to achieving high-performance operations. In short, Avanade believes digital collaboration represents the area of IT with the greatest potential for business impact in the next five years.

Avanade's vision for digital collaboration in the enterprise is built around three areas where we see the most opportunity to create efficiency and productivity breakthroughs in how people work with information and with each other across a global enterprise:

• First, the "tagging" of people, content and physical assets with context information (semantic keywords, presence, location, business processes et cetera) as a mechanism to automate the discovery and usage of information and expertise.
• Second, enabling and fostering the development of user-driven content and communities to maximize employee contributions and connection to the organization. Transforming ideas in people's heads and laptops into broadly used organizational assets and harnessing the power of communities as proven by the Internet.
• Third, connecting the world of the knowledge worker with the operational view of the enterprise and with relevant external information—i.e., integrating familiar, easy-to-use spreadsheets, email, and virtual workspaces with information from corporate systems like ERP/CRM and third-party services—empowering employees with data and information that is critical to decision making but typically not easily accessed or used in enterprises today.

In order to realize the full potential, Avanade believes that IT departments will need to provide new service offerings and take a holistic and proactive view on the enterprise architectures and tools required for digital collaboration.