The Key To Business Collaboration: Data

Collecting, connecting and visualizing data is the need of every enterprise these days since they hold the key to business collaboration. Data helps in measuring the issue and verifying the result. In order to see improvement in results, data is an area where every business must focus on as it has become one of the most crucial factors to bolster a competitive edge over your rivals.

Departments in business collaboration are bound together by data:

A shared goal is one of the most critical things that you need to see between departments if they are to align. Each department in business collaboration has its own set of responsibilities, quotas, budgets and objectives. The only thing that stays constant in every enterprise is the need to innovate in order to give results that are better. Hence, data has become an important factor that binds everything together.

Whether or not our technologies and ideas are good enough is determined by data and there is no one person who can determine that effectively without analyzing data. Such information lies beyond the border of a particular department.

IT is implanted into every conversation by data:

Companies which are data-driven and customer-centric rely heavily on data for planning, analyzing, predicting and executing plans. IT has been brought to front line because of this reason and now acts as an expert consultant on how data can be leveraged the best. IT isn’t limited to providing data anymore but explains the possibilities too.

Thus, data now holds the key for a business collaboration to succeed. A business enterprise can hold an edge over its competing enterprises by concentrating on data.

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How to Increase Collaboration in a Workplace with a Mobile, Social Intranet?

Social Network and Mobile phones have become a way of life. This is how we communicate and manage our tasks everyday. So, having same options for how we work makes more sense.

The Vice President of IT for St. Joseph Health, David Baker, recognized this and set out to build a social and mobile solution at the Health care organization. David's main goal is to increase collaboration and improve productivity for employees at 14 facilities across three states.

The ways to Boost Workplace Collaboration:

1. Find out that employees need more: David describes St. Joseph’s previous legacy intra-net tool as a 'glorified repository'. If the company has 25-thousand employees, only 1 thousand were considered users, and among them only 100 were active and just four were categorized as “power users.” Also, there was a general frustration among employees about not being able to get access to the information they were looking for. So, it is better to develop a completely new intra-net solution.

2. Build it a Place where People Wants to go: The tag line of St. Joseph Health for the staff hub project is “Email is where information goes to hide.” Mobile and social intra-net has liberated data and info for employees, and encouraged interaction and collaboration across the business.

“Folks from Northern California, Southern California, and Texas, that may have not had a voice or understood there are other people out there working on similar stuff, can connect. It's helping us to become a true enterprise company,” says David Baker.

3. Encourage Leadership Support: David made a request to St. Joseph’s top management that they try to log into Staff hub everyday to read a few posts. He provide them the tool available on their mobile device for this. He asked them to post one time a week as employees are always interested in what their leadership has to say. The result was CEOs and VPs become regular contributors from the beginning, encouraging adoption company wide.

Follow these three ways to increase collaboration in a workplace with mobile and social intra-net. Do you have any other idea in your mind? Share with us in the comment section, Click here to visit our website right now.

Are you Using the Right Communication for your Business?

Technology has largely influenced business around the world. This you can see through emerging modes of alternative communication. But from so many available communication solutions, how do we choose exactly what mode of communication to use with our co-workers, customers and acquisitions from all over the world?

 

Use of technology communication systems such as phones and video conferencing, made many companies moving towards long-distance collaboration. But, video conferencing can be a great benefit to businesses as it cuts down on the costly loss of time and money caused by excessive air travel.

But, it is important to recognize that technology should not replace travel and face-to-face communication altogether. Some business practices needs to be done personally. So how do you know when to do which?

Here are some different modes of communication and see when one proves to be most effective: 

1. Email: Emails can be most effective solution for simple question and answer solutions, calendar reminders and one-on-one communication. On the other hand, during group collaboration and brainstorming, sending out multiple emails with new updates is not entirely effective.

2. Video Conferencing: It is a great way to communicate with a small group of people. This method can be used to generate new ideas, check progress of projects, solve small issues and saves tons of time and frustration. With video conferencing, you can work together quickly to come up with solutions that work for everyone in a real-time environment. 

3. When to Move out of Workplace: When you have to deal with a large group of people, train personnel, or have to land new clients, then it is better to have face to face interaction. Face to face contact is key to establishing healthy business relationships. When the deal has been signed and you have worked through the major decisions and content, then video conferencing can become a great asset to your business endeavors.

Which mode of communication you prefer? Does your business use one more than any other Communication Solutions? Share with us in the comments below.

Best Social Media Collaboration Platforms

Social media is not about conversations only, but it is also about collaboration also. Keeping this in mind, it would be interesting to take a look at some of the most well known digital tools available to help collaboration.

Here are 7 Best Social Media Collaboration Platforms:

1. Atlassian Confluence: It offers a powerful wiki-based solution to enterprise collaboration. Using this tool, content can be simply dragged and dropped from the desktop to the platform, thus eliminate the need for keeping track of attachments sent via email.

 

2. Google Documents:  Simultaneously reading and editing of files makes Google Docs ideal for students and other casual collaborative groups. The updated version of Google apps offers additional security options for business. 

3. Adobe Acrobat: It allows teams to work collaboratively on documents through their browsers. Various options on Adobe Acrobat for web conferencing and screen-sharing provide additional communication channels.

 4. Basecamp: This platform offers collaborative messaging and file sharing. Using Basecamp, project management can be easily tracked with milestones and deadlines. A team can set up to-do lists, calendars, projects & more all at one easy to login site.

5. Sharepoint: It provides a single platform for employees to work collaboratively through various methods such as wikis and work flows. Here you can create personal profiles which allow teams to better understand each other’s skills, interests and experience.

6. Tibbr: This collaboration platform uses a design that is familiar to Facebook users. One key feature is the ability for employees to follow subjects, stay tuned on news and developments in their area of business.

7. Socialcast:  It allows employees to discuss projects remotely through a micro-blogging service, accessible from smart phone. The Town Hall extension on Socialcast enables discussion between executives and employees.

So, these were the seven social media collaboration platform that you can use. And, if you are using any other platform, then please share with us.

Online Collaboration Alternatives To Sharepoint For Small Businesses to Increase Productivity

If you want to run business in today's competitive economy, then you need to gain more flexibility, enhanced information exchange and collaborative teamwork. Well, this shows the importance of collaborative technology.

Today, Microsoft SharePoint is the most prominent solution for collaboration. It is an on-premise collaborative software model, but is more suited to big businesses with huge IT budgets and large number of employees. Microsoft Share-point also has some disadvantages like huge setup costs, no email functionality, software complexities, and costly training and support issues.

But, the SAAS (software-as-a-service) approach gives small businesses a viable alternative to access this software over the Internet at reasonable fees. Here are some packages that could offer valuable productivity gains for small businesses that host websites on 100TB servers:

1. HyperOffice: It is an alternative solution for the small businesses moving from on-premise software such as Microsoft SharePoint to the cloud. Small Businesses need only a broadband connection to access this robust software solution at low costs. Some other benefits includes HyperOffice  has that lack in SharePoint include email functionality, drag and drop portal publisher, an interactive Gantt chart in place of the static Gantt chart in SharePoint and forums.

2. Box.com: This is one of the best Business collaboration software alternative offers a scalable, affordable and simple alternative. Box.com provides small businesses with features such as file storage, file collaboration and content management on the cloud. Also, it is simple to synchronize your files on the desktop, receive feedback at a nominal price and share them with colleagues.

3. Huddle: This alternative is one of the best cloud collaboration tools. It is designed with ease and efficiency in mind, and thousands are using it for enterprise collaboration and content management. Small businesses can easily manage and exchange information or projects with others using Huddle. It also allows you to track project deadlines, view late projects, milestones, completed tasks and even reassign projects, thus making collaboration easy and efficient.

4. Google Apps: This is a free alternative to Microsoft SharePoint. Google Apps offers simplicity, efficiency and clarity, allowing small businesses to organize the day-to-day schedules, files, projects and teams securely. Some other features offered include easy navigation, advanced searches, email integration and free conference calls.

So, these were the four alternatives to Microsoft Sharepoint that small businesses can use and increase their productivity.

How to Overcome the Barriers to Communication?

The barriers to communication exist all around us. Sometimes your message is misinterpreted by team members during meetings. We generalize information in every conversation and yet think that we clearly understand what others are saying and why they are saying it.

There are many ways through which we interpret the information given to us, and these cause us to have a misunderstanding. So how can we overcome the barriers that effectively blind us to meaning and comprehension? 

Following are the five ways to overcome communication barriers: 

1. Understand how your way of seeing things is different from others: Try to predict the feelings and attitude of the receiver. What will be their expectation? What prejudices might they have? What about their state of mind when you are communicating? If you know these things before communicating, then you can reduce the risk of misinterpretation.

2. Feedback from receiver: Don't ask the receiver, ‘Do you Understand?’.  This is because they will most often say ‘yes’ as they see things in the way they want to understand it. Instead, ask what is their understanding of the message?

3. Speak Face to Face: This will allow for questions and, also allow you to see the body language of the receiver, which will convey much more meaning than over the phone or through email.

4. Use the Right Communication Channel: Use email for its proper purpose. It means that don't send an email if it's quicker to pick up the phone or go and talk to the person. We are rapidly losing the art of conversation, so don't add to that by using the wrong channel.

5. Make it easy for others to listen to you: Develop your communication style that one of a conversationalist who is able to make a point quickly. If your key message is lost in the morass of a thousand words, then people will wonder what you mean and what the purpose is. Brevity and Clarity are the watchwords.

Using the above points, you will be able to certainly reduce the risk of barriers interrupting the key messages you want to make. If you know any other way to overcome the communication barriers, then share with us below in the comment section.

4 Insanely useful Collaboration Tools Your Team Should Know

Do you remember the first time when you saw the real-time collaboration feature for Google Docs first time? Now it seems obvious, but in 2005 seeing changes happen live felt nothing short of magical.

Today, after ten years, Google Drive continues to add improvements, Microsoft is offering real-time collaboration in their on-line version of Office, and Dropbox is working on a real-time collaboration app of their own.

But, still many people are stuck using the email-and-collect-revisions method of collaboration. Today, many cool websites and apps looks at four tools that fix that for you.

1. Fiddle.md: It is limited to writers in one key way, i.e. it offers a word processor. While for millions word processors are the default tool for writing, but for a growing number of people their paper-focused design is obsolete. And so the popularity of Markdown is growing, which is a quick way to format documents destined for the web.

Fiddle.md allows you collaborate on Markdown files. The interface features a real-time-preview, and also you don't even need an account to try the service.

2. GraphPaper: If you are looking for a way to combine a bunch of different collaboration tools, then GraphPaper is probably worth a look. This tool lets you quickly make a sheet combining images, text and even embeds from other websites.

3. Canavaniser: If you love the idea of brainstorming with your team and are looking for something simple, then try Canavanizer. This tool provides you a variety of brainstorming templates which you can use to think up ideas with your team.

4. Frame.io: This app looks to make collaborating on anything – from images to videos to sound – easily. In Frame.io, annotation tools, comments and the ability to upload various revisions of the same file all are there in one place. A free account gives you 2 GB to work with, for more than that you will have to upgrade.

These were the four insanely useful collaboration tools that your team should know. But, there might be chances that one of your favorite tools wasn't covered. So, share your favorite real-time collaboration tools with us in the comments below.

Collaboration Tools That are Awesome for Students in Task Management

If you are looking for tools that can help you in managing different kind of tasks, then following collaboration tools will definitely help you with any need. These collaboration tools are helpful for keeping both the individual and an entire class on track so that no assignment or task gets left behind.

Tools For Task Management

1. Google Calendar: Google Calendar is a great shareable calendar that a whole class can use to stay on task with tests, assignments, and more.

2. CollegeRuled: College students can create schedules, share or print them on Facebook, and can participate in class message boards.

3. MyNoteit: This collaboration tool is just for college students. It allows students to organize and share notes, to-do lists, assignments, calendar and different tasks.

4. Remember the Milk: This tool is a popular to-do list that keeps tasks organized. Some features of Remember the Milk include reminders, iPhone compatibility, integration with Google Calendar and the ability to share with others.

5. MeetWithApproval:  Students who are working together can plan a study group, meeting or other event with this tool.

6. GradeMate: Both students and teachers will enjoy the benefits of this collaboration tool that is made for managing grades and organizing and sharing assignments, files, notes, discussions and more.

7. Toodledo: Another to-do list, this tool offers a feature that organizes and analyzes your priorities, dates, and time estimates to create a time management schedule that will keep any teacher, student or group on task.

So, these were the seven collaboration tools that students can use to manage their different tasks. If you are using any other useful tool that we may have skipped, please share with us in the comments section below.

How Social Work Collaborate with Other Disciplines

Social work may combine with different topics, which includes the need for support when it comes to adolescent health, behavioral health, an aging population and schools. In these practides, there is a need for social workers to collaborate as part of multidisciplinary teams. Whether it is a government appointed social worker collaborating with area hospitals or a school social worker strategizing with the school nurse, there are some common threads between these partnerships.

Following are 3 examples of how social work may collaborate with other disciplines:

1. Legal Collaboration: According to the National Center for Medical-Legal Partnerships, over 250 health care institutions in 36 states have adopted medical-legal partnerships. This model has united professionals in the medical, public health and legal communities through their shared interest in social determinants of health.

2. Public Health Collaboration: Many of the social workers in the US work in the field of public health, so it's understood that collaboration exists there. Social workers and public health professionals often work together when it comes to natural disasters or any infectious disease. Also, social workers collaborate with public health officials for safety in communities. Some public health officials are partnering with social workers to apply empowerment-based intervention and develop prevention strategies around sexual assault and domestic violence.

3. Education Collaboration: Collaboration in social work can take on many forms, when it comes to education. School-based programs for teen mothers, such as usage of expertise of social workers and outside organizations such as state Departments of Education and medical centers to provide academic support, childcare services and counseling in order to bolster teen mom's success in school.

How to Encourage your Team to Work Together?

In today's business world, collaboration has become a pretty big buzzword. Every company hopes that cloud technologies and content sharing platforms will enable its staff to efficiently work together, wherever they are. However, if leaders are not truly committed to creating a culture of collaboration, then their employees will never reap the full benefits of these tools.

Kevin Lynch, CEO of cloud content collaboration service Volerro:

“A collaborative culture should be something that employees feel, rather than something that the executive team talks about, [When this happens], it inspires a sense of community within an organization, while driving productivity, insight and innovation."

If you want to make cloud collaboration technologies truly work for your business, you need to show your team how to work well together. 

Here are six simple ways to encourage a cooperative workplace:

1. Set Team Goals: Use plans and structured content that clearly defines present and future goals for the team. With this, all team members can share a distinct point of view.

2. Build cohesion: Build a means of communicating that establishes a distinct set of priorities, allows for easy work flow and makes all colleagues feel included. If you keep everyone on the same play book, it enables team members to focus and flourish.

3. Develop a creative environment: This allows team members to brainstorm in an open and judgmental framework that embraces the team's diversity.

4. Break Down Barriers: Use of multiple channels of communication such as email, text messaging and phone can ultimately create barriers to successful collaboration. It is good to use just one channel that allows the team to communicate efficiently and effectively.

5. Visualize ideas: This provides team members the opportunity to use visuals to clarify and share their ideas at the simplest level. Visualize ideas with anything from rough sketches to full-scale presentations.

6. Execute: With all focus on idea creation, remember the most important step: acting on the good ones. A failure to implement existing proposals will kill the employee's desire to create new ideas.

These six Points are very helpful to encourage team to work together. If you want to lean more about team collaboration then you must read this Article in this article you know about the software used in Small and Big size Organization for Make Collaboration and Communication between employees better to make a great team : http://www.alturacs.com/blog/business-collaboration-tools-midsize-small-businesses/ 

5 Steps to Cross Organizational Collaboration and Teamwork

Teamwork and collaboration make an important contribution to the success of business initiatives.  To create effective teamwork, you need to break down any departmental barriers to collaboration so that you can draw on the best people. Set clear objectives and define working relationships so that members can work as a cohesive team.

Here are the five Steps to cross organizational collaboration and Teamwork:

Overcome barriers: One among the major barriers to effective collaboration is the conflicting needs and priorities of the team and the individual departments in your company. All department managers have their own targets to meet and may be reluctant to release key staff for external projects. So, you need to convince departmental heads of the importance and benefits of the team project and persuade them to cooperate.

Agree Direction: Project teams need a clear sense of direction to turn members into a team. You can encourage shared ownership by asking team members to agree the key objectives and define the benefits to the organization.

Recruit Members: Cross-functional teams bring together people with the skills and experience to deal with all aspects of a project. Ask your human resources department to maintain an up-to-date skills profile to find the right people. The profile should include personal skills, important achievements, work experience and involvement in other team projects.

Clarify Responsibilities: A balanced team includes all the skills your team needs to complete its work at different stages of the project. For example, projects like new product development will require different contributions at each stage.  So, it is important for each member to understand their role and responsibility at each stage.

Support Collaboration: Your team will work more effectively if it has the tools to support easy collaboration, like email and instant messaging simplifies communication between members and makes it easy to share documents, project updates and other essential information. Also, accessing information from a single source helps to eliminate the risk of duplication or working on out-of-date information.

Why you need to adopt Collaboration Services on the cloud?

Now a days, more and more businesses are keen to engage and collaborate with stakeholders within and beyond the walls of their enterprise. Whether it is the customer, partners, coworkers, or suppliers, businesses are keen to collaborate with them in real time. And to facilitate the seamless flow of information and knowledge-sharing between stakeholders, today businesses make use of services called collaboration services.

For scalable and reliable delivery of the applications, it is important to adopt cloud computing.  Here we have listed five compelling reasons that makes you to change your mind about moving your collaboration workload to a cloud platform.

Flexibility and Reliability: Today, collaboration happens across geographical boundaries and time zones. And, cloud-based collaboration solutions are not restricted to a specific geography and can reach the employees of an organization dispersed across regions.

Grow and shrink your operation freely and instantly: Reducing complexity and adaptation to changing business environment are some of the major challenges that IT industry faces today. But if organizations adopt cloud-based collaboration services, they get access to elevated elasticity in resource allocation that allows them to grow and shrink their operations freely and instantly, without carrying the burden of provisioning or de-provisioning expensive resources. 

Latest functionality of the continually upgraded versions of the apps: Cloud-based collaboration services always ensure that the latest security patches and application upgrades are applied to the cloud delivery platform to ensure that the consumers get secure access to the new functionality quickly. The entire configuration or migration process is performed by the back end teams, thus, relieving you of the effort to manage downtime.

Reduced Operational Costs: Cloud-based collaboration services allow organizations to start deployment immediately. With this, they able to save the cost of buying new servers and are also get benefited from the reduced need for space, liability and power. Many of the cloud-based services run on a 'Pay-per-use' subscription model which allows companies to budget for them easily and more accurately. 

Reduced Risks: If you use an open platform and open clients for application access, shifting from one vendor to another is an easy task. If you plan your deployment well, then you will be able to shift with minimal or no change at the end point.

The above mentioned are just five ways in which businesses benefit from adopting cloud-based collaboration technology. But, if you dig a little deeper, you will find many more such compelling reasons to adopt this platform.One of them is listed here Just check this out to know more : http://www.alturacs.com/solutions/midmarket-collaboration-ip-office/

Collaboration | Why Collaboration Is Important In Today's Business?

Today, collaboration is something that has become an important factor for business success. The rise of cloud computing and faster Internet connections have enabled collaboration more than ever and so, it is important that a business should collaborate effectively for its excellent growth.

Here is why collaboration is important for the growth of your business:

Self-awareness: Collaborating challenges you to articulate and find out what you are good at, and what you do poorly. This honesty about your strengths and weaknesses can force you to ask for help when necessary and be confident about how you can help others.

Creative Abrasion: The term 'Abrasion' stands for the process of wearing down through friction. Though we associate friction with something negative, but actually it is a kind of energy. So why not convert that energy that comes from working with people who are different from you, to something positive? Just leverage the differences and work to identify what can be complementary about them.

Collaboration

Take the Long view: Sometimes things don't work out well when you collaborate with others. But does that mean you never attempt again to work with that organization? No. Take the long view about perceived failures and try them again.

Learn, Learn and Learn: Collaboration propels your firm to become a learning organization. Each time your firm collaborates with others you optimize the capacity of your associates to extend beyond their comfort zone, and that in turn, stretch the boundaries of the organization.

Therefore, considering the above points we can say that collaboration is important for the growth of your business. Although, it is not necessarily easy, but it can get your firm in a much more interesting position to innovate.

Why we need to Improve Business Collaboration?

The term collaboration is much more than a technical architecture, product or solution. It is the experience that integrates processes, technology and people. It is believed that by working collectively, people can achieve extraordinary things.

An organizational chart may show hierarchy, but it does not show real business collaboration, i.e. how people actually interact outside, inside and across the organization. Therefore, to find ways to improve the connections between people and the information they need to share, is important for improving business.

Empower, Engage and Innovate

The goal of collaboration technology is to help people share as naturally as possible. But, how you get there?

• Empower people to work their way i.e. when, where and how they want to work, without any limits.

• Provide the best collaboration tools to engage people to connect with peers and other organizations.

• Innovate people to develop ideas and solve problems.

New Collaborative Environment

Opportunities comes from the combination of technology and people. The collaborative environment gives people the flexibility to be where they need, to do the best work.

A company must use an architectural approach, integrating mobility, and cloud to bring people together anywhere, anytime and on any device. Connect your company's employees, suppliers and customers to make decisions, address supply-chain challenges, or resolve customer issues. The architecture cost-effectively supports security, scalability and accessibility.

So, implement collaboration solutions to:

• Simplify work flow, save time and increase workforce interaction and productivity.

• Flatten organizational hierarchy and better communicate with all levels.

• Increase customer responsiveness by providing faster access to experts and information.

• Make trust and understanding across time zones and within teams through video communications.

Along with productivity improvements, these Business collaboration solutions can help you reduce real-estate costs, travel and greenhouse gas emissions by supporting virtual meetings and telecommuting. Increase your Productivity with Collaboration Softwares.

Re-valuate Workplace Collaboration to Get Your Work Done Anytime Anywhere

The work from home movement has been rapidly increasing day by day, but lately we have been seeing more employers allowing employees to work across multiple Internet-connected areas located on-premise for e.g. conference room, thus removing the ball and chain feeling that comes with the cubicle.

There are many benefits of having employees working together in office, from increased team morale to immediate communication. However, for those employers that are not yet comfortable letting their employees working from home, this approach allows them to strike the perfect balance of productivity, work agility and IT security.

Some professionals said that some employees may want to work in-office but don’t want to be tethered to a desk for hours. Moreover, the communication tools that are now at their disposal, for example mobile phones, integrated solutions like social and chat applications make it more than possible for them to work anywhere and anytime.

“I know I don’t want data and documents to only be accessible on a Windows machine that lives in office,” said Esna CEO and CTO Nezarati. “When you go to Google’s offices, sometimes employees are working from their desks but they may also be working from a desk chair outside getting some fresh air or in a meeting room all this happen with collaboration of Network. Today, it’s all about taking your work with you on any device, anywhere.”

Near about 60 percent of full-time workers recently surveyed said that they partake in some form of bring your own device (BYOD). But 80 percent said that they believe the constant connectivity afforded by work applications empowers them to do their jobs better. But also, the work environment depends on the age of the employees. Those older in age, wants to work from home because they have families.

Overall, the short answer is that the cubicle setting will never disappear completely. But things are changing, specially in leading brands like Google and Facebook that will continue to blaze the trail for employers who are more seriously considering the benefits of unconventional and creative workspaces.
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