SINGAPORE--Embracing new collaboration tools will be the key competitive advantage for businesses through 2009. Those that falter will fall behind, says an industry expert.
According to Kathy Harris, group vice-president and specialist in applications manager analysis at technology research firm Gartner, knowledge workers are picking up new technologies on their own faster than enterprises can begin to understand them.
Employees have been using a lot of technologies such as instant messaging and blogs in their jobs, but businesses are only just starting to invest in these technologies to drive up productivity, she said.
Examples of such technologies include blogs, instant messaging and wikis, which allow individuals to create content for Web pages or online forums that are then edited by other like-minded users.
In particular, Gartner predicts that wikis--such as the popular Wikipedia online encyclopedia--should become commonplace in at least 50 percent of enterprises worldwide within the next four years.
Because tools such as instant messaging and blogs allow people to share ideas and resolve issues quickly, managers who fail to capitalize on this trend will risk valuable intellectual property created by employees, Harris said.
"As we are multi-taskers, the number of things we do (at one time) is growing. The need to get something resolved quickly is very high," she said. "If it takes me two months to resolve those, I may never get down to doing it again."
While Harris acknowledged collaboration tools may not be applicable to every aspect of an employee's job, they could mean a difference between an idea becoming reality and dropping it altogether.
She added that such tools are already prevalent because people have been very adaptable to these technologies, except in places where the organization does not understand their business value and impact.
"In cases where there is lower adoption, it is usually because companies do not know enough about these technologies to make a policy decision," she said.
According to Gartner, companies have to tread a fine line between managing new tools that improve work productivity, and limiting the number of new technologies the IT department needs to deploy and manage. Otherwise, they could face disruptions to their IT infrastructure.
Harris explained that disruptions would only occur if an IT infrastructure is not flexible enough to adopt these new applications. "The disruption is negative if you can't manage it and adapt to it. It's positive if there are productivity gains and new ways of working."
Embracing these tools may require administrators who support the workplace infrastructure to understand what is happening at work, Harris said. "If both employees and customers are using (these new technologies), what are we going to do when customers demand (the company) to use these tools?"
Specifically, customers may want product and application developers to interact with them on blogs and wikis so that they can talk to them directly, she added.
"We need to monitor many of these agile and simple workplace technologies because they are evolving quickly. This is different from evaluating systems which are large and mature and change slowly."
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