John Earnhardt today posted a great blog about a CEO video message to employees this morning challenging us to use web collaboration to “cancel one trip this quarter and use Web 2.0 collaboration technologies to conduct your business in lieu of traveling”. Timing couldn’t have been better for me as I was trying to get out of a trip to the East Cost next week. Problem solved.
Earnhardt’s blog talks about the cost savings, environmental impact and work/life balance benefits of web collaboration (which are all great points) but I like to focus on the tremendous productivity gains. According to Frost & Sullivan, companies that use web collaboration as part of their business processes achieve substantial productivity gains (paper available here).That’s because collaboration is the complex, time consuming connector of every stage of a business process. Even small collaboration productivity gains in a multi-step process deliver significant returns. It’s no surprise that 80% of Business Week’s most innovative companies use web collaboration.
Earnhardt’s right. Cutting out one trip this quarter is good for the environment and your life. It cuts costs and that helps the bottom line but it will also help you accelerate sales cycles, reduce customer support times, improve training and drive results at the top line. It’s one of these rare win, win, win, win scenarios and I don’t need video message to remind me...although it did come in really handy this morning.
Colin Smith
colin.smith@webex.com
