Gartner PCC: Strategic Planning for Collaboration in a Fluid Market

The collaboration market is on fire, which creates risks and opportunities for companies.  When and where should you place your bets on these technologies?  Social software in the consumer market has taken off like gangbusters.  740 million people use Facebook and we’ll get to one billion soon.

These collaboration technologies are making inroads into businesses.  But there are concerns about mixing personal and business data.  Business users fear getting overwhelmed with the overload of information both at home and the workplace.  At the same time, the potential benefits of collaboration across the broad spectrum of collaboration technologies can’t be ignored.

Revolutionize Your Business With Generative AI

From product design and software development to virtual agents, content creation, and reporting, GenAI is transforming business. Our AI experts help you unlock GenAI’s full potential and drive growth.

Let’s Get Started

Matthew Cain of Gartner employs a scenario planning-based approach to strategic planning around collaboration.  Scenario planning is used to forecast events when events are really unknown.  Scenarios delineate the range of possible futures over three to six years.  Once you have identified the possible scenarios, you can begin to make strategic plans.

Mr Cain’s conclusions include the following:

• The most important point is to have a strategy rather than the strategy itself.  The strategy must be alignment with your other corporate strategies, including risk tolerance.
• You need to understand the difference between elements that are and are not controllable
• Attention to corporate attitudes toward collaboration is key
• Most companies will need to experiment and not rely on ROI just yet.
• Balance control (security/privacy/legal) against opportunities, but HR & Legal will be involved increasingly with collaborative investments.
• Keep in mind that external collaboration experiences will need to influence internal collaboration experiences

In terms of vendors, Mr. Cain says there is tremendous vendor churn.   Microsoft has good footing based on their share of the email and office software market.  Other vendors will tend to co-opt with Microsoft in the email area instead of compete head-on.   All vendors will compete on the emerging technologies and these tools will be in state of flux as vendors enter and fail in the market.