The Business Case for Improved Collaboration

Today's challenging business environment means that companies have to do more with less. This requires improvements in efficiencies, a concentration of resources on the things that truly matter and the creation of new business.

A key factor in being able to realise business goals is through increased collaboration and improved service quality to clients. A further huge benefit is through the reduction of risks to the business by adopting collaborative technologies. Hence you need to factor in both the cost of not doing it as well as the costs to do and the anticipated cost savings or improvements.

Collaboration Tools

Wiki's, blogs, in-house portals, instant messaging provide tools to help businesses achieve improved collaboration. Wiki's and blogs help to capture and share information that otherwise stays inside someone's head - and when they leave that knowledge remains within the business. This reduces the time taken for replacement people to get up to speed and hence both saves money and improves quality of service.

The ability to easily identify and contact in-house subject experts is a key benefit that reduces time to solve problems, reduce risks and develop new initiatives.

Portals have been around for quite a long time but over the past few years there have been massive improvements in terms of both cost to implement and also in terms of the user friendliness, power and quality of the products.

Microsoft SharePoint

SharePoint portal technologies is a massive area of growth and has received huge investment from Microsoft to become a market leader in portal solutions. Gartner have have positioned SharePoint firmly as a leader in the Magic Quadrant for enterprise portals.

Implementing SharePoint solutions can provide a rapid return on the investment however many companies have fallen into the trap of believing it is trivial to install, configure and design. It is true that Windows SharePoint Services is an easy product to install and setup in a single server configuration. However SharePoint is a complex technology requiring skills across a wide range of server products and technologies.

It can become very frustrating for business leaders to realise the anticipated business benefits if you do not have access to good SharePoint expertise.

SharePoint provides many ways to solve a problem which begs the question "What is the best way to solve this problem?". To answer these questions you need to employ resources who are both SharePoint experts and also good business analysts.

There is also confusion amongst businesses as to:-

√	What the right SharePoint product to use?
√	How many servers to use?
√	What cost savings will I get?
√	How do I build the business case?

This is where Solvetech can help as trusted SharePoint advisors to UK based businesses.

To discuss any needs you feel we may help you with please contact us - in the UK call us on: