New research published by Dimension Data reveals that technology has failed to improve the competitive positioning of global organisations. This is one of the key findings in their 2016 Connected Enterprise Report.

87% of organisations said the use of collaboration technology had improved teamwork, and 88% of enterprises had accelerated decision making.

The Report provides an overview of the state of collaboration implementation strategies, and highlights trends and disruptions in enterprises across the globe. The findings are based on a study of 900 participants in 15 countries, and participants include IT directors, CIOs and line of business managers working in organisations with over 1,000 employees.

According to one in five organisations polled, collaboration technology had failed to improve their competitive positioning. However 87% of organisations said the use of collaboration technology had improved teamwork, and 88% of enterprises had accelerated decision making.

Joe Manuele, Dimension Data’s Group Executive – Communications, says that apart from improving employee productivity and teamwork, the research indicates that more organisations are turning to collaboration to drive new revenue and sales.

“Some 14% – the second highest number of respondents in the Report – said improving sales is the top goal of their collaboration strategy, while one in three organisations said increased sales was among the three most important ways of measuring the success of their collaboration projects.”

“improve competitiveness involves larger changes to how the company does business, and its role within its industry.”

“Enterprises have had varying degrees of success when it comes to the improvements that the use of collaboration technology was intended to provide,” explains Brian Riggs, Principal Analyst – Enterprise Services at research firm, Ovum. “They’ve become adept at improving teamwork and productivity, partly because they can work directly with employees to make this happen. But leveraging collaboration to improve competitiveness or streamline business processes can be a lot more complicated. It involves larger changes to how the company does business, and its role within its industry. These changes can take significant time and effort to achieve.”

Other key highlights in the Report include:

• A quarter of those organisations polled said they measure the success of their collaboration projects by how well they’ve implemented the technology, rather than how it’s used and adopted throughout the organisationOne out of three IT departments see moving unified communication and collaboration to the cloud as the most important technology trend affecting their collaboration strategy. However, less than 25% of organisations currently rely on hosted collaboration services.

• At one out of three organisations, enterprise social collaboration is used by all – or most – employees, and nearly half of all companies that were surveyed said they expect social collaboration usage to increase over the next year.

Click here to learn more about the Dimension Data’s 2016 Connected Enterprise Report.

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