Collaboration tools are used to boost productivity and improve communication and cooperation between employees and team members working from remote locations. But do top-level executives use these tools well?
A great example comes from Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who is a big collaboration tools fan, calling them indispensable for his work. Straight from Microsoft’s Office Online blog, Bill tells all:
This release of SharePoint also has many social networking features that I find enormously helpful. In addition to searching any corporate intranet site for documents, SharePoint now enables me to search for specific people based on their expertise, job title, or the department they work in. Also, employees can easily create personal Web sites where they can post photos and list their experiences and interests. SharePoint even automatically associates every document with its author, and explains his relationship to other employees on the same team and in his department. So SharePoint makes it far easier to quickly identify the two or three people who are experts in parallel computing, for example, even though there are more than 80,000 employees at Microsoft now.
Bill also talks about acquiring industry and market-trend information by using Excel 2007 and Sharepoint to access “the kind of data that used to be hard to find because it was stored in back-end databases”.
Bill might be just a teensy-bit biased about Sharepoint’s capabilities (and of course, you can imagine the fallout if Microsoft was discovered to be using the competition’s offering. We all have to drink our own champagne...). But the main point here is that collaboration tools of any brand of technology can provide essential productivity benefits for employees from the bottom to the highest levels of an organization. Provide your employees with the tools to overcome geographic, organizational, or corporate boundaries and start working smarter.
Vaclav Vincalek October 15th, 2009 03:00:00 PM