Abstract

This IDC Perspective provides insight and guidance for IT buyers regarding the technology, culture, best practices, and overall recommendations when deploying or upgrading enterprise collaboration applications. Forced to do more with less, leading companies are leveraging employees, partners, and customers through collaboration applications to drive bigger, faster, and cheaper business results, while developing more engagement and loyalty from all three audiences.

Leading companies are establishing new ways of working, making decisions, and scaling talent across silos and geographies. Collaborating with partners and customers creates a new level of loyalty, which outweighs pricing considerations. This changes the dynamics of a business relationship from seller/buyer to maker/partner and creates a different value proposition in doing business that changes the nurture stream. Still, collaboration is as much about communities, behavior, and corporate change as it is technology.

"The 'collaboration imperative' is a fundamental change in how we work where We > Me," according to Wayne Kurtzman, IDC research director responsible for the Social, Communities, and Collaboration practice. "Consumer technical savviness is enabling connected employees, partners, and customers to redesign how work is done — as a community with mutual interests. This is reshaping business for decades to come."

Coverage