Video collaboration eliminates geographic boundaries by bringing colleagues, partners and customers together around a virtual conference table—regardless of their location. But to truly boost productivity, businesses need to employ the right collaboration tools supported by a company-wide unified communication strategy. Here are five of the most important steps to help you achieve this mission:
- Get Back to Basics: Conduct a thorough assessment using proven methodologies to provide a clear view of what exists today and what needs to be added or changed. Some of the existing IT infrastructure will likely support video collaboration, but IT needs a list of technologies that will smooth the process.
- Learn All the Benefits: In addition to communication and competitive advantages, video collaboration improves project management, optimizes workforce productivity, improves responsiveness to market changes, supports complex global networks, accelerates adoption of real-time business models, and reduces travel costs—all while uniting a decentralized workforce. Documenting these benefits helps sell the cost of the technology to senior management.
- Solve the Toughest Problems: Knowing who will use video communication and collaboration and how they will use it helps ensure an effective and widely-adopted solution. Reach out to managers and key employees to discover and solve their pain points. The key to strong ROI is aligning the IT investment with the business needs.
- Test the Network: Unified communication networks route traffic for data, voice and video over corporate IP networks. But there’s an important distinction between traffic in a local, low-intensity environment and an enterprise-wide backbone serving thousands of users at carrier-grade levels of reliability and performance. Before relying on video communications, be certain to eliminate performance and availability issues.
- Plan for the Future: While video collaboration promises productivity gains, significant benefits extend far beyond the desktop. Immersive video rooms can replace business travel and customer care can be transformed with virtual in-person experiences. Video enables innovation across all areas of the business.
To find out where your company is along the journey toward a collaborative enterprise, visit http://ow.ly/B16O7