What’s Driving Enterprise Collaboration? Hint: It’s Probably in Your Pocket

It’s a safe bet that when most people hear the term “enterprise collaboration,” they probably associate it with sharing documents through a server or the cloud, or maybe some sort of online communication. Those are, after all, the most common and basic use cases.

But, according to a new survey, that’s not what’s actually driving the adoption of enterprise collaboration solutions. That would be phones.

Nearly 75 percent of enterprise businesses in IDG’s Enterprise Unified Communications and Collaboration survey said they were rushing their efforts to install a unified, company-wide communication and collaboration system, because of the proliferation of consumer smartphones, tablets and other devices. This could account for several things from the gaining acceptance of bring-your-own-device policies to the maturation of video conferencing technologies like Skype and even Apple’s FaceTime, but they all point to one thing: companies are realizing that they need to quickly adapt to an increasingly mobile workforce, and they’re realizing that mobile communications technologies are a major driver of production and crucial to the bottom line.

Who’s Buying?

According to the survey, 59 percent of enterprise organizations had already spent money on communication and collaboration technology, while 90 percent of respondents said they planned to this year. It’s not an insignificant cost either, with the average organization spending $383,000 this year, and a quarter of larger companies spending more than $1 million per year. With that type of money being spent, communication and collaboration technologies are getting the attention of the executive suite. Two-thirds of companies say the CIO and senior IT management are involved in the purchase decision process of these technologies.

Culture Changes Driving Decisions

What stands out most about the study, though, is that devices are forcing what amounts to tectonic shifts in the ways companies do business. While smartphones have been around for roughly five years, their capabilities are finally becoming powerful enough to shake the foundations of business behemoths. It’s making business easier and employees more productive – increasing productivity was the top reason companies cited for pushing communication and collaboration technologies – and connecting employees was a top priority for a lot of companies. The study says:

On the application side, telepresence video and systems, as well as social media tools, generate a lot of attention. But so far, these technologies have gained traction primarily at large companies. For example, 52 percent of respondents said they’re investing in telepresence, but most of them are spending only moderately. Only 36 percent of respondents consider video to be a key component of their (Unified Communications and Collaboration) UC&C approach. But companies with 1,000 or more employees are far more likely than companies with fewer employees to put a high value on either technology.Even free videoconferencing tools aren’t widely used right now: less than half of respondents (48 percent) use Skype and only one‐fourth use video chat via instant messaging. Companies may consider free tools to be testbeds, however. They’re more likely to be used by companies in the planning stages for future investments than by those that have already deployed UC&C tools.Fewer than half of respondents (48 percent) say their companies have implemented or will implement social media tools such as LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook as part of their UC&C deployments. Again, large companies are more likely to have deployed these. The findings suggest, however, that IT executives are more aware than other respondents of social media use at their companies. More than half of heads of IT report that social media is or will be included among UC&C investments. Respondents in high tech and government are more likely than respondents as a whole to have already implemented social tools.

It has been remarkable the watch the importance of mobile technology explode in the last five years. It was a productivity boon for workers to be able to check and respond to email anywhere in the era of the Blackberry, but now, in the age of Android and iPhone, its crucial to a businesses’ bottom line for workers to be able to check email, host video conferences, do online research, make videos, chat, communicate via social media and work an entire day from anywhere the need to be.