By Joe Zarb, Director, Customer Business Transformation, Cisco
Low adoption. Poor economies of scale. High cost. No ROI. Failure. These are some of phrases that describe many of today's collaboration initiatives that deployed knowledge- and document-management systems, enterprise portals, and business intelligence data warehouses. Why? Because these projects focused on the information associated with collaboration and not on the process of collaboration. They were missing the core attribute of true collaboration: people.
Collaboration: The Human Element
What is collaboration? At Cisco, we define collaboration as the "art of teamwork" people coming together to solve problems, create opportunities, and share and learn from one another. How do people collaborate? With their senses. They look, discuss, listen, and touch. Think about your last team meeting it probably started with a handshake, a smile, and brief introductions so everyone could speak and be heard. Then the work began. That's collaboration, and that's why Cisco has been investing in the equipment, software, and services to capture, transmit, and stream voice and video and link these human dimensions of collaboration to documents, data, and business applications.
Collaboration-Enabled Business Transformation
How can you make collaboration an integral aspect of your business, rather than a technology buzzword for documents and structured data? Enter Collaboration-Enabled Business Transformation (CEBT). Unlike Communication-Enabled Business Processes (CEBP), CEBT comprises a wide array of web services including:
- Call control for voice
- Video on demand and streaming video for images
- Presence for intelligent call routing
- A variety of click-to-connect services such as:
- Chat
- Email
- Web conferencing
- Voice calling
Where CEBP extends a business process, CEBT has the power to literally transform processes reducing human latency, improving productivity, and boosting employee effectiveness as a result.
CEBT Transforms Your Value Chain
Today's collaboration involves employees within enterprise boundaries as well as partners and customers who make up the extended value chain. The information that is shared among these parties must be secure; the quality of delivery particularly for voice and video must be superior in order to preserve the integrity of person-to-person interaction. That's why Cisco continues to invest in providing best-in-class, highly secure and flexible collaboration tools to support the full potential of CEBT.
