Moving on from “who” to “why”, we asked respondents to list the top 5 factors behind their organisation’s interest in collaborative software. We then weighted the answers and here is the summary.
The top answer is predictable. It does provoke a question that we didn’t ask: Do you measure or in some way track the productivity of your teams? Many organisations only do this loosely. They have some rough idea of team outputs but they don’t have a good model of the reasons for team productivity. If team productivity is your main goal and you don’t have some way of assessing it then how do you know if your collaboration software is worth the effort or not?
The second answer was less expected (and hence more interesting). Effective decision-making requires a whole raft of resources and yet this need is not demonstrated as a priority by vendors. Some do offer “business intelligence” dashboard capabilities but this is often only one input into the decision-making process. There seems to be a big potential opportunity here.
One surprise in the current economy was the low placing of cost reduction factors.
OzCollab - The Australian Collaboration Software Report 