Technology news and Jobs 
VIRTUALISATION Frost & Sullivan survey quantifies the benefits of collaboration
VIRTUALISATION Frost & Sullivan survey quantifies the benefits of collaboration | Frost & Sullivan survey quantifies the benefits of collaboration |
|
| by Stuart Corner | |
| Wednesday, 14 October 2009 | |
  
Featured Whitepaper
5 Best Practices for Smartphone Support
Other benefits are harder to identify and even harder to quantify but Frost and Sullivan claims to do have done just that, and the results have been published in a white paper. According to the white paper, "This study is the first global study to determine a model for measuring return on collaboration (ROC). It provides clear evidence demonstrating a continuum of collaboration-driven performance, such that the deployment and usage of progressively more advanced IP-enabled collaboration technology yields increasing levels of organisational performance." The ROC, according to the white paper "shows the amount of change in specific functional areas that organisations experienced when they deployed advanced collaboration tools." Unlike a traditional Return on Investment (RoI) index, which tracks the amount of money directly gained or lost on an investment relative to the amount of money invested, ROC captures the broader concept of 'improvement' that results from collaboration being used in the functional areas, relative to the overall amount of money invested in that functional area. The study took the form of an online survey of a total of 3,662 managerial-level and above individuals in organisations in Asia-Pacific (Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, and Japan); Europe (France, Germany, Sweden, and the United Kingdom) and the United States. Organisations surveyed were either small and medium businesses (50 to 999 employees) or enterprise (1,000 or more employees) in the financial services, government, healthcare, high technology, professional services, manufacturing, or retail industries. Respondents were asked how they would rate their own organisation's performance over the last year, relative to other organisations in their industry, across key performance areas - overall customer satisfaction, sales and profit growth, labour productivity, and product and service innovation. For those companies that deployed collaboration tools, 72 percent stated that they experienced better performance, compared to only 46 percent of companies that did not deploy them. The differences in performance in these areas between those that deployed and those that did not were most apparent in innovation (68 percent versus 39 percent), sales growth (76 percent versus 50 percent), and profit growth (71 percent versus 45 percent). According to the white paper, ROC is based on the performance impact of collaboration in a specific time period, calculated on the amount of money an organisation spends on each of the six key performance areas against the total amount spent on deploying UC&C solutions during that time period. These components of ROC are expressed mathematically as ROC = ((functional area spend) x functional area change) /overall UC&C spend. Functional area spend is the total annual organisational revenues multiplied by the revenue percentage spent on each functional area. Functional area change is the percent of improvement on each functional area that the organisation believes is attributable to deploying collaboration solutions. Overall UC&C spend is the total amount of money an organisation spent to deploy their collaboration solution set during a specified time period. |
Tags
| < Next story in category | Previous story in the category > |
|---|
