Thursday 27 April 2017

Why Implementation of Video Collaboration Technology Fails

The world of technology is all pervasive and has made significant strides into all walks of our work and personal lives. Businesses across the world are adapting high profile collaboration technology with varied motivations. Enterprise collaboration technology is seen as a set of hi-tech tools and solutions that provides high speed anytime connect with remote teams, reduces over-head costs of travel and accommodation for business meetings, enhances productivity among the team members, brings in diversity and richness in the enterprise when the organization is working with people from different cultures and locations, etc.

Why Implementation of Video Collaboration Technology Fails: WebTechLand

Why Implementation of Video Collaboration Technology Fails

The video conferencing technology that used to be bulky, expensive, with patchy video and audio quality, requiring heavy hardware installation is now a story of the past. Today, the video collaboration technology is high-end, extremely friendly and provides amazing seamlessness of conferencing with HD quality audio-video, is available on mobile devices and is moving away from hardware based installations to cloud-based video conferencing systems.

Unfortunately, in most cases, organizations often go for bundled video conferencing systems which appear very advanced and offer an endless list of features. But seldom, organizations do a need analysis within their team members and narrow down on the necessary and immediate collaborations requirement of on-site and remote team members. This results in rich investments in acquiring the technology which is neither fully utilized nor addresses the specific issues the teams face while collaborating within and outside.

A stark disconnect between technology implementation and actual usage came to fore when an IT services firm Softchoice conducted a survey. The survey revealed some alarming numbers and trends which result in the failure of implementation of video collaboration technology.
Out of the organizations surveyed, while 70% organizations provide video conferencing systems to their employees, only 5% of the employees use the technology on a regular everyday basis.
While 60% organizations provide screen sharing tools to their employees, only 8% of the employees use these tools for better collaboration on a regular basis.

About 40% organizations under the survey provide social collaboration tools to their team members, only about 10% of employees take advantage of this technology available at their workplace.
Based on these findings, it is clear that technology has issues within organizations with far lesser people taking it on than intended. It is easy to bring the technology in but it is the implementation that fails miserably when technology doesn’t attract many users. And many organizations across the world are facing similar issues with the team members not actively engaging with the collaboration systems provided.

The simplest way out of this situation is talking to the actual users and taking into consideration their specific requirements and issues with the technology.The company has to actively reach out to the end users of the collaboration system and understand from them what do they expect from the technology and making technology friendly to them. There should be familiarization sessions to impress upon them how a little getting used to will go a long way in helping them with most of their complicated collaboration tasks and management of such calls. The enterprise should collect feedback from its teams and work together with the technology partner to customize video conferencing systems addressing most of the issues of the team. The technology and systems should be designed based on what is needed and not what all technology may offer. Sometimes, too much of technology in one go intimidate users and they stay away.

It is very important that advent of any new technology in the organization is welcomed, introduced properly and familiarization sessions are held. This brings people’s anxiety down and brings them closer to the technology. The initial phase of the launch of a new collaboration technology should be made a very visible event with proper publicity using posters, internal communication emails, etc. And last but not the least are the training sessions with experts to demonstrate the utility, advantages and leap this technology offers.

Poor reception and adoption of any new video conferencing technology also hampers the growth and productivity of the team. Companies need to address these lingering issues in order to optimize their efforts towards reaching business targets, enabling team’s growth and making working with each other across locations fun.