A new office culture is taking hold in top organizations. Increasingly, business leaders are recognizing the need to close the gap between people and information, a shift that will help their organizations become more efficient, productive and creative. How are they making this leap? By ensuring employees can easily find, use and share critical information.
To make this happen, organizations require new types of information management technologies to help them find, organize and deliver information of all types, regardless of where it sits. This ability to control data is critical. It can help organizations gain a competitive edge, empower employees to make better business decisions, boost productivity, and ultimately help achieve greater business success.
This access to and control of information is increasingly more important in today’s team-based organizations. A recent survey by Ipsos Reid found that 86 per cent of Canadian professionals feel that working in teams is more important to business success today than it was five years ago. But despite this recognition, effective teamwork remains a challenge. Today’s workers need to collaborate with large numbers of people, and do so over different mediums ̶ be it online, offline, over a mobile device, or with their co-worker in the next office. And as teams become more dispersed, organizations must ensure that information is easily accessible to employees, no matter where they are.
Clearly, businesses need access to not only enterprise search technology, but to end-to-end integrated information management solutions ̶ that enable searching, collaborating, analyzing, publishing, securing and managing information ̶ a growing focus for software companies such as Microsoft. Increasingly, organizations are finding that technologies focused solely on search limit opportunities for collaboration; shortchanging the user in the end. For these organizations, the integrated experience Microsoft brings to search is of great business value.
One such organization, the Ontario March of Dimes (OMOD), clearly recognized the need for a solution that improved teamwork and collaboration, while managing vast amounts of information. As the province’s largest rehabilitation organization, OMOD has nearly 2,000 full-time employees, and facilitates community participation and independent living programs to an estimated 37,000 people who suffer from a physical disability.
Supporting such a large workforce across numerous offices requires extensive administrative activity – time consuming work that made it harder for teams to connect and collaborate. To improve internal processes, Bell Business Solutions and its partner EnvisionIT, built an employee portal based on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 to help employees find the information they need quickly and easily.
The wide range of collaborative techniques made possible by using SharePoint Server 2007 with other 2007 Microsoft Office applications, enabled staff at OMOD to create team sites in SharePoint for collaborating on projects. Instead of relying on emails, the site enables them to manage document versions and other aspects of their projects.
With these tools, employees now have the ability to easily find information and improve the organization’s productivity by connecting people with the right data quickly. Staff can access information from anywhere and as a result, are better prepared to handle time-sensitive requests, and make faster, more informed decisions.
Just as important as finding information, however, is managing that flow of data. As employees of OMOD found, it is easy to become overwhelmed by the amount of documents that they have to deal with. Documents may float throughout the organization, with revisions by several people that, in the end, are destined to be lost in translation. Having to constantly share documents or switch frequently between tools can be a frustrating and unproductive experience for end users. It also obstructs the very collaboration it is meant to facilitate.
According to IDC Canada, the average Canadian business spends nearly $4,400 per employee per year to search for relevant information to do their job. These costs can be avoided if organizations embrace the new office culture of instant information access. To achieve this, they require the right software to help them streamline and simplify workflow. No one tool can achieve this. Instead, businesses need end-to-end information management technology that will help employees across the organization do more, faster.
Today’s organizations know how important it is to find the information they need no matter where it is stored, share it with colleagues and use it to drive intelligent decision-making. This is the driver for the delivery of new solutions that meet the needs of an evolving office culture, and the key to helping businesses build and maintain a competitive edge.
Elizabeth Caley is a senior product manager at Microsoft Canada. Caley is responsible for the business management and strategy of SharePoint and Microsoft Office Business Applications. Caley’s product management and marketing experience spans a broad portfolio of areas including: portals, Web content management, forms, collaboration, document and records management, search and information retrieval, knowledge management, business process management, mobile and wireless applications.