I am attending Forrester's Content & Collaboration Forum 2011. Forrester notes that in five years, almost half of US workers — about 63 million people — will work virtually. I am already one of them. This will change everything in workplace IT support from designing workplace information strategies for collaboration, to delivering content experiences to people across channels, to engaging the next-generation workforce to serve customers better. These notes are near real time so please excuse any typos.
The Forum explores what the “current demand for more portable, social workplace experiences means for your workplace strategy.” It “shares the latest trends in technology adoption and how firms forge better business outcomes from a more mobile, social, and virtual workforce.” Sheila B. Jordan, Vice President, Communication and Collaboration IT, Cisco Systems presented a Key note: Enabling The New Collaborative Workspace. Here is the session description:
“Much of the end user value proposition behind “Enterprise 2.0” is an integrated, contextually aware experience that enables people to spend less time shifting between technology silos and more time getting work done. It’s about breaking past traditional boundaries by empowering and engaging people with a workspace that’s inherently social, mobile, visual, and virtual. Enabling this new collaborative workspace, however, comes with significant challenges — and business leaders are turning to IT, HR, and corporate communications departments to manage these.
Where and how should organizations get started with this transformation? What success factors and metrics can they use to steer their efforts in the right direction? How do they drive adoption, change management, and effective governance throughout the experience? And, most of all, how do they derive sustainable business value from their investments? Sheila Jordan has led the transformation behind Cisco’s Integrated Workforce Experience (IWE); she will share some of the best practices and lessons that she and her team have learned to help you down a successful path of your own.”
Shelia started by saying the collaboration is the IT investment of the decade. The Cisco collaboration portfolio has evolved of the past few years to accommodate this. They have a social platform called Quad. Collaboration can break down any barrier in the organization if architected correctly. This includes an enterprise architecture. You can start with pilots but you need to get to the integrated enterprise. Services oriented architect fits in here. You need to integration to avoid silos.
New business requirements include: mobile, social, visual (video), and virtual. We are in the post-PC world. All aspects of the PC world have been shattered. Trends driving IT now can be grouped as: business, technology, content, and mobility. Speed is key. Now too much IT spend is focused on basic operations. More needs to shift to strategic uses and business capabilities.
Content is the most exciting and daunting. Email is getting worse and now there are many other forms of content bombarding us. The picture is too complex and IT needs to mask some of this complexity for the users. They created an integrated workforce experience powered by Cisco Quad. The themes were connect, communicate, learn. They started by integrated all the Cisco tools. They then looked at collaboration in relation to work needs and not for its own sake. Now they personalized the experience for each individual. The last component was to integrate transaction systems to provide the whole workforce experience.
After doing this for themselves they created a product, Quad. It integrates with EMC and CRM systems, among others. The integrated architecture includes these layers: device, collaboration, transformation layer (to cover all devices), web services and enterprise apps. They have many different types of devices and vendors within each device category.
They set up an enterprise app store to cover the traditional enterprise apps and create personalized apps to fit individual needs. Her vision is to have an app store container that allows you to drag in apps to fit your needs and your devices. This is a work in progress. They also have video for the entire organization with different levels for different roles. Video reduces travel, and speeds up collaboration to increase a variety of work processes.
She next asked what is the value of collaboration. There is an operational ROI, productivity ROI and strategic ROI. This is a work in progress of them to find value in these three ways. They estimate over 1.5 billion in benefits in 2010 from collaboration. She used these numbers to return to her theme of collaboration is the IT investment of the decade.
She was asked about organizational changes to make these things happen. They first created a steering committee with all functions involved. The vision was central but the individual units were responsible for the deployment in their function. Shelia knew from past experiences that this had to be an IT and business collaboration to be successful.
Shelia was also asked about transparency. She said the cultural aspects is the hardest, more that technology or process. With this vision you can get a real sense of the pulse of the company but you have to be ready to hear it.
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