Free to Roam.

If you could break down communications barriers across your organization, how much more productive would your teams be? Finding that answer is precisely what collaboration solutions are all about.

Bringing people and ideas together in the digital workplace means more than simply adopting a single collaboration tool or application. Enabling truly collaborative work requires a holistic approach that takes telephone, video, document sharing, messaging, and much more into account.

Desk phones might have gotten the job done in the past, but those legacy systems were designed for employees stationed at a single desk all day. We know this is no longer the case – in fact, Digital Strategy Consulting found that 60% of employees now use mobile apps for work activities. And that number is expected to rise.

By a similar token, video conferencing of the past was often prohibitively expensive and difficult to come by. Those factors kept it largely in the boardroom at the hands of senior leadership – a trend that today’s digital businesses can’t afford to follow.

And even with relatively current phone and video solutions, many businesses still encounter problems with systems’ interoperability. For example, in a BYOD and shadow IT world, some companies can have three or more IM apps to communicate between teams – and dividing time and support resources between those disparate programs burns valuable time. Trying to connect entirely different types of media such as video is an even higher bar to clear.

Thankfully, new collaboration solutions can stitch these experiences together onto a single platform. These teleconferencing technologies allow for more fluid, natural exchanges than legacy technologies do. Similarly, mobile technologies have democratized conferencing, allowing anyone to connect via voice or video when away from the work desk. And solution providers like Zones have the resources and expertise to tie all of these elements into one neat, fully supported package.

We’ve already helped some of the world’s largest corporations bring their teams closer together through technology. When Starbucks needed 22,000 tablets configured and rolled out to all of their locations for a major nationwide training initiative, we rose to the occasion – our proprietary Zones nterprise™ project execution platform enabled us to configure, ship, and track all of the necessary devices in just four days.

Once armed with their new technology, workers could connect with lessons and instructors seamlessly, which helped the training proceed smoothly across the board. Without a consolidated platform supporting an initiative of this magnitude, there’s no telling how time-consuming and complicated things would have been. Today’s workers need digital solutions to succeed in a digital world, and that’s why collaborative IT is so important.

When businesses unify their internal communications the way Starbucks did, they find more efficient IT management, more robust collaboration between teams, and greater satisfaction and engagement – particularly from the growing Millennial wave of the workforce. Consolidating so many different aspects of IT into these straightforward collaboration solutions might seem daunting, but that’s why solution providers like Zones exist. Our architects hold over 50 industry-recognized certifications in the design and deployment of endpoint and collaboration technologies, and they’re ready to put it to use helping businesses solve these pressing communication challenges. When it comes to collaboration, there’s no need to go it alone.

In the future, our experts forecast a continued migration from legacy technologies to cloud-based software platforms. Simply put, cloud technology is more flexible, more able, and more easily managed than its dated alternatives, and we’re likely to see more and more of it in the coming years. Given the cloud’s great accessibility, this bodes well for the future of workplace collaboration as well. Expect to see teams connect, edit, and share with even greater efficiency and intuition as technologies develop further.

Explore Zones Workplace Modernization Solutions.

This article originally appeared in the Fall 2018 edition of Solutions by Zones magazine.

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