Ever feel like the picture below depicts your typical workday? You wake up in the morning with such high hopes for today’s productivity and then suddenly you’re stuck in the mud of day-to-day Corporate America. Put another way, how many of you get 50, 100, even 200+ emails a day intermixed with your 5-10 daily meetings AND on top of that you are supposed to get your REAL job done? If my guess is correct it’s most of you reading this. It seems Corporate America (henceforth called CorpAm) has become a productivity drain. Most of the people I talk to about this have the same problem; go to work from 9-6 to take their meetings and answer urgent emails, then book it home to see the kids before bed, after which start trying to answer the rest of their email and finish all their work. It’s a never ending cycle in which you fall farther and farther behind. I spoke to one mid-level executive recently who works for a multi- billion dollar company and he said he had almost 75 action items he was tracking in a spreadsheet because none of the existing tools he had found could manage the information effectively. Wow! I think the new mantra in CorpAm should be — Let’s get back our lost productivity –, or how about — Let’s take back 2 hours in our day –. (more…)

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Team collaboration and social networking software are all the buzz right now, however we need to look at the overall contribution these technologies bring to the enterprise in terms of value before we determine if they should be the new “cool” technology.  Are IT programmers ready to answer the CIO’s question of “How will team collaboration software add value to our business?”?  Maybe?  Maybe not?  What I hope to describe is how you can answer that question and what to look for in order to get your company started using collaboration software to solve real business problems.

Which leads us to our first real question we need to answer and that is – how does collaboration add value to the bottom line of a business?  (more…)

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