That’s the view of Mark Finch, VP of Innovation and Incubation at OpenText, who was speaking exclusively to Enterprise Communications during its recent ‘Executive Interview Series’.
Designed to create awareness of the latest developments within the enterprise communications space, this series of one-on-one video interviews drew business leaders together for a day to discuss how firms should be harnessing social collaboration to deliver real business benefits.
As Finch told Enterprise Communications’ moderator, Mark Dye, he’s been using the technology to good effect to select the right people when having to prepare for things like sales presentations in areas in which he might not have direct experience himself.
“I also needed to pull together videos and presentations so I could get that content together. In the end we ended up with about twenty people involved in this one project able to immediately share the content, produce the presentation, share scripts and things like that,” he says.
Finch revealed that the technology had some kind of relevance to almost every organisation looking to improve things like operational and organisational efficiencies, telling Dye that it was something that could be used to turn local brainstorming and ideas into global projects.
He also stressed that in his mind social collaboration was all about teamwork, organisational effectiveness and problem solving whilst pointing out that the technology would help to bring colleagues and partners closer together – something he says can only be a good thing.
Interestingly he told Enterprise Communications that he believed businesses did not need a standalone strategy for social collaboration and should instead seek to support strategies in specific areas before listening, learning and engaging.
Of course, social collaboration and instant messaging are accepted in various ways and to different extents depending on which industries are served. As a result of this, Finch acknowledges that those within highly regulated arenas, such as banking, will require very different strategies and set-ups.