As 2017 heads to a close, it’s time to step back and reflect on the state of the market we call “collaboration”. Not only is change constant, but many shifts we’re seeing are far-reaching and poised to transform not just collaboration, but the very essence of work. At some point, we all become saturated trying to keep up, and it’s tempting to concede defeat and just say “whatever” and simply go with the flow.
My role as an analyst is to make sense of all this and distill things for decision-makers. By nature, I’m vendor-neutral, and focused on how these changes impact the workplace as well as where they bring business value. Decision-makers need to make a business case around collaboration technology, and my value comes from providing an informed foundation to help you make the right choices.
The first message to relay with all this is to not wave the white flag. Nobody can stay on the leading edge of all the trends, and my writing is intended to help you stay above water, at least enough to not feel overwhelmed. Once you stop trying to understand what’s driving change, it’s very hard to find cycles again to jump back in, especially once the next “big thing” emerges – and it will.
Most importantly, that state of thinking puts you at a great disadvantage when trying to evaluate the vendors. When they know they have an edge over you, it becomes much easier to sell the sizzle than the steak, and that really matters for collaboration. Unlike product or premise-based forms of technology, collaboration is a service, or a platform that is increasingly being hosted offsite in a cloud somewhere. These offerings are essentially virtual, and when you don’t understand the associated technologies, it’s hard to know what you’re really getting and where the business value lies.
This may be a generic statement, and when it comes to collaboration, both certainly apply. Collaboration is just one of several competing priorities that IT must manage, and since your time is limited, my role is to make it as easy as possible for you to choose the best path forward. There has been a lot of change during 2017, with more coming in the new year.
To help set you on the right path, this marks a new series where I’m going to highlight the changes you need to know about. Some change is disruptive and poses risk for your decisions around collaboration. Others will be positive, and represent opportunities to help you make collaboration strategic for the business. To set the tone for this series, here are some examples of both ends of the change spectrum, each of which will be addressed in more detail over the next few posts.
This trend continues, and with that, the collaboration experience will evolve to rely more on messaging and video. Deployment will become simpler, solutions will be less costly, and the platforms will be more aligned with how Millennials prefer to work.
It’s not quite here, but AI will be the dominant collaboration trend for 2018. Current applications are quite basic, but things are moving quickly. While there’s great promise for automating workflows and making collaboration more effective, the marketplace is getting crowded and you’ll need to be careful when assessing offerings and defining your needs.
Cloud has been the big trend for 2017, and that will continue into 2018 and beyond. Both the cloud and AI represent positive change in the sense that you’ll have new entries to choose from if you’re ready to consider offerings beyond the familiar vendors from UC or telephony.
2017 saw major forms of consolidation, mainly among vendors, but service providers as well. This may produce some economies of scale, but at a cost, as there are now few smaller, independent vendors to buy from. Market power is falling into fewer hands, making it even harder for new players to emerge.
This has been an ongoing challenge, first with UC, and now with the even broader scope of collaboration. Not only does this allow for a bigger pool of vendors to choose from, but to make those choices, IT has a lot of work to do just to define collaboration for their organization. As technology keeps evolving, this job will only get harder, never easier.
The current political climate does not bode well for this pillar of the Internet economy, and the implications will be felt across all strata of society. This is a meta-issue that concerns everyone using the Internet, and while it’s too early to tell what this means for collaboration, there will be implications for IT decision-makers to consider.