Welcome to our Spring 2008 Newsletter where we provide an insight into some of the key areas within organisations being impacted by the global rollout of Enterprise 2.0 solutions.

Organisations are experiencing increased workloads and ongoing pressure to produce innovative products or services. The ability to deliver within the current technology framework is extremely challenging and new tools and processes are constantly being sought. It is now widely understood that an integrated collaborative and communications environment that allows the creation, capture and leverage of knowledge within an organisation is the major driving force for the uptake of Enterprise 2.0 technologies.

Enterprise 2.0 will play a particlularly important role within any organisation during a recessionary environment - having smart people, good products and services and solid customer relationships will not be enough to ensure ongoing success without the successful application of enterprise collaboration and communication tools.

Collaborative Benefits include:

• Knowledge retention and re-use
• Empower employees to contribute and innovate
• Stronger connections and awareness of expertise among employees
• Virtualisation of employee skills and knowledge
• Ability to dynamically create and manage productive virtual teams
• Real time collaboration and communications 24x7
• Increased employee satisfaction
• Dramatic reduction in the cost of service delivery
• Collaborative services can be easily extended to clients and customers as/and when required

Key management areas using collaborative technology - 

Knowledge Management:
Employees need access to the right material and the right people within their workplace to enable them to provide the levels of service now demanded across all levels of business. Effective collaboration tools connect people to the experts and content that is needed in the timeframes required. A major benefit when incorporating a knowledge management capability is the ability to easily locate and reuse information. Research indicates that there is a considerable need for same or similar information on a day by day basis. Having this information available for direct query or via a website reduces effort and cost with employees able to deliver consistent and accurate content when working internally or with customer enquiries. Having a collaborative knowledge retention and re-use function provides a corporate memory that will outlast all other forms of current knowledge management whilst providing a virtual environment that will allow employees to contribute and innovate.

Employee Engagement:
One of the most significant ongoing challenges to an employer is to locate and retain talented employees. A large proportion of new employees from this point forward will be Generation Y's - those born between 1978 and 1994, characterized by a happy go lucky outlook, have no understanding of difficult economic times, are not primarily focused on financial rewards and prone to change jobs to suit their lifestyle. Providing collaboration tools such as wiki's, blogs, discussions, forums, instant messaging etc. - technologies that are borne of the consumer social networking movement (such as MySpace and Facebook) not only provides a familiar environment for Gen Y's but also allow innovation and contribution by empowering all employees. This leads directly to increased employee satisfaction and long term loyalty.

Collaboration:
New Collaborative practices require cultural changes that deliver a more open work environment where knowledge sharing is encouraged. Employees are more often than not working in teams, some permanent, others put together for specific projects. Selecting team members that not only work well together but achieve the goals set is often a difficult task. Many organisations have offices in multiple locations and it is often difficult to access employees with specialist skill sets that are not available locally. Collaborative tools remove the barriers associated with geographic restrictions. Virtual teams can now be built (chosen from online profiles) and managed using sophisticated tools that allow members to collaborate and communicate quickly and effectively wherever they work or reside 24x7.

Communications & Portability:
The virtual workplace will become more common as we address changing work practices that have to deal with globalisation, green business initiatives and rising fuel costs. We will see a reduction in national and international travel with more staff, either when they have to be on the road or more likely working from home, armed with facilities that include social networking productivity tools, messaging, voice over IP and video conferencing.This will provide not only an acceptable working environment but also a virtual world meeting experience that will simulate the feeling of being there in-person.

Good communications, both internal and external, has always been a factor in any successful organisation. Unfortunately, today we face a barrage of communications from voice calls - fixed and mobile and e-mails - desktop and mobile (Blackberry etc).  Management of these technologies has become a burden and many are seen as inefficient. Voice over IP (VOIP) telephony services are having an impact in both lowering cost and introducing new capabilities such as staff having a single contact number that will roam with them wherever they have a "presence", removing the duplicity needed with current technologies. Enterprise instant messaging is expected to become the norm, bypassing e-mail. Just as e-mail became a business necessity, a new generation of workers has a new expectation for instant messaging (IM) as the preferred method of business interaction. This will fuel more rapid adoption of unified communications as traditional IM becomes the core extension point for multi-modal communications.

For information on our Collaborative Solutions:

For further information please visit our Main Website or our Community Website.
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Email: info@lzt.com.au and Telephone: (08) 9467 4999

Kind regards

Mark Foley
Marketing Director