Collaboration needs assessment for enterprises

A recent survey of enterprises by IDC indicated that while 89% of enterprises believe that the ability to instantly share all relevant documents and communications within a virtual team is useful, only 19% of enterprises have the infrastructure in place to make it possible. What type of collaboration needs does your organization have? How do needs differ across different user profiles? Is an asynchronous solution good enough for certain parts of your organization, while others require real-time collaboration? This fifteen-question needs assessment will help you understand at a strategic level the types of considerations that your organization should be thinking about as you develop and start to implement a collaboration strategy.

How this tool can be used This tool can be used to diagnose your collaboration goals at an executive level. These questions will help guide your collaboration planning exercise, or, if you are looking to update your current collaboration infrastructure, it will help you reassess your needs based on your goals and audiences.

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Collaboration needs assessment for enterprises

Questions Section one: Diagnosing your needs and goals 1. Have you identified what collaboration capabilities you need both internally and externally? • Collaboration with colleagues • What are your goals for internal collaboration? • What types of collaboration are currently being used? • What are the collaboration needs of your internal groups? • What gaps do you have? • Collaboration with partners • What are your goals for external collaboration? • What are your needs related to collaboration with partners? • What types of collaboration are currently being used with partners? • What gaps do you have? • Collaboration with clients • What are your goals for a collaboration program with clients? • What are the needs of your internal groups for collaborating with their clients? • What types of collaboration are currently being used with clients? • What gaps do you have? 2. Categorizing your employees based on collaboration needs is an important step in developing your plan. For each of the following, identify different types of profiles, teams and departments that have these needs: • Low collaboration needs – don’t require much external input for their work or have restricted options, e.g., bank tellers • Medium collaboration needs – need the ability to communicate both internally and externally with a variety of audiences but with limited media, e.g., email only • Intensive collaboration needs – need the ability to communicate in a variety of formats and content and media, both internally and externally, e.g., executive assistants, executives, marketing

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Collaboration needs assessment for enterprises

• Specialized collaboration needs – need access to specific tools or information and to be readily available, e.g., technicians, support engineers • Real-time collaboration needs – need to be able to communicate in real-time, e.g., for remote or mobile workers, or branches and other offices • Asynchronous collaboration needs – employees can be productive with a delay in information delivery vs. immediate contact 3. How dependent are internal and external project teams on shared information, by department or job function? Conduct this assessment for each department or job function: Department / Job Function: • Very dependent: • Somewhat dependent: • Not at all dependent: 4. What types of collaboration tools are currently in use in your enterprise?

Departments

Tools used

Email and calendaring Audio conferencing Sharing – team portal/document/other Instant messaging Video conferencing Unified communications Web conferencing Web 2.0 components

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Collaboration needs assessment for enterprises

5. Is your organization standardized on common collaboration and information sharing tools across the whole organization? • If not, do you plan to standardize? • If so, how are you defining the criteria you will use to evaluate the tools that are available and decide on a platform? 6. Have you integrated mission-critical collaboration tools holistically across the enterprise? • Very effectively • Somewhat effectively • Not effectively • Not a priority; ad hoc is fine • Not integrated

Section Two: Developing the plan 7. Do you have a plan in place to develop and evaluate a collaboration strategy? • Have you defined what success looks like: • Enterprise-wide • By department • By user • Have you established benchmarks and a timeline for review? 8. Have you considered how users would adapt to a more collaborative environment and the effects it would have on the culture within your organization? 9. Has an executive champion for collaboration projects been identified? 10. Is there enterprise-wide buy-in? 11. Who determines the budget spend on collaboration technologies? 12. Has the timeline to ROI been defined, and is it in line with executive expectations?

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Collaboration needs assessment for enterprises

13. Do you have a set of prospective pilot users defined for different requirement scenarios? • How will lessons learned from the pilot groups be integrated? 14. Is there a user education and adoption plan in place? 15. Does your plan include a roadmap for implementation across the enterprise and over the long term?

Wondering how you can make collaboration work for your organization? Contact your Bell representative or write to us at [email protected]

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