In order to be more competitive in today's ever-changing landscape, enterprises need to leverage collaboration technology, according to new research from Dimension Data.

The 2016 Connected Enterprise Report found one in five organisations say 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 - customer experience and collaboration business unit, 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,” Manuele explains.

Brian Riggs, principal analyst - Enterprise Services at research firm, Ovum, says enterprises have had varying degrees of success when it comes to the improvements that the use of collaboration technology was intended to provide.

“They've become adept at improving teamwork and productivity, partly because they can work directly with employees to make this happen,” says Riggs.

“But leveraging collaboration to improve competitiveness or streamline business processes can be a lot more complicated,” he says.

“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,” he says.

The report also found 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 organisation.

One 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.

According to the report, 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.