Cloud Collaboration

The Power of Me We

“Are you a team player?” – If you’ve interviewed for any position in the last five years, chances are you would have heard this question. But have you ever wondered what has made teamwork more important in business over the last few years? Why is collaboration between people (Power of We) more valued over individual brilliance today (Power of Me)?

I believe that the growing importance of teamwork in business can be traced back to two phenomena – one, the explosion of human knowledge and two, the globalization of commerce. Let me explain.

Human knowledge, and by extension business knowledge, has exploded in recent years. By some accounts, 90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last couple of years, and as we know, knowledge is the logical progression from data to information and then on. This knowledge explosion has made it impossible for all information of business processes to be encapsulated within a few individuals. In other words, the era of the generalist is over; everybody’s a specialist nowadays. And specialists within an organization, while having deep knowledge about their areas of competence, exist in their own narrow silos and need to collaborate for the betterment of the organization as a whole.

For comparison, consider the human body. Long ago, there was only one kind of doctor – the physician. Medical knowledge had not yet advanced to justify the existence of specialists like nephrologists, neurologists, psychiatrists, etc. However, they cannot work at cross-purposes when treating the same patient – their efforts have to be collaborative. Similarly, collaboration is required between the business specialists of today.

Now we come to the second cause – globalization. As businesses spread their wings, it became obvious that collaboration between employees was necessary for success. After all, one person can’t implement a strategy in Beijing and Houston at the same time.

Technology over the last few years has advanced to support this increasing need of collaboration. From telephones to faxes, from emails to videoconferencing, modern businesses have a lot of tools to support collaboration. Now, Avaya has come forward to present the next big thing in teamwork – the collaboration cloud.

Readers of this website will be aware of what cloud computing in general can do for business. But it’s Avaya that has crafted a cloud-based solution from the ground up that directly addresses the business need of enhanced collaboration. In this way, Avaya has leveraged its domain knowledge in communications technology and combined that with all the cloud has to offer in terms of cost efficiency, load balancing, scalability and availability to create a unique product that allows businesses to experience the “Power of We”.

This post is sponsored by the CIO Collaboration Network and Avaya.

By Sourya Biswas