All organizations know that effective collaboration is crucial to the success of their business. The better teams can work together, share knowledge, and innovate, the faster your company will grow, overcome challenges, and unlock new opportunities.

Unfortunately, exceptional collaboration doesn’t happen “by chance”. That’s particularly true in today’s world of flexible and hybrid work. If companies want their teams to work efficiently together, they need to empower them with the right technologies and processes.

The only way to ensure you build an environment that cultivates and nurtures collaboration is to  leverage the right data. Unfortunately, this can be more challenging than it seems.

Leveraging Collaboration Data: Overcoming the Challenges

Data-driven insights are what help companies to understand the workflows and processes of their employees, overcome common roadblocks to productivity, and reduce operational costs. Only when the right data is available, can businesses make intelligent decisions about how to structure work schedules, office spaces, and tech investment strategies.

Unfortunately, accessing and using this data comes with certain challenges.

Challenge 1: The Rapid Growth of the Technology Stack

Today’s teams don’t just rely on one or two tools for collaboration and communication. Individual workers are leveraging around 11 apps each day to stay productive. Companies need to gather insights from everything from project management tools, to meeting room software (like Microsoft Teams Rooms), collaboration platforms, and video conferencing apps.

On top of that, there’s the data gathered by your voice systems to consider (related to quality assurance and outages). Plus, the various devices employees use each day, from desk phones and smartphones, to laptops, all generate their own data.

Without a comprehensive view of all of those data points, it’s difficult to gain a holistic insight into how employees are genuinely using their technology, spaces, and resources.

Alfredo Ramirez, CEO of Vyopta, adds:

“A comprehensive digital collaboration experience management platform is crucial for integrating diverse systems and providing a unified view of technology utilization to enhance employee collaboration.”

The Solution?

To overcome this challenge, organizations need a digital collaboration experience management platform that can integrate seamlessly with all of the tools their employees use, offering a combination of technology, space, and user insights.

For instance, companies like Vyopta offer access to a flexible ecosystem that can collect data from a wide range of unified communication and collaboration applications, devices, and infrastructure systems. The result is a single pane of glass view of every factor contributing to collaboration.

Challenge 2: Drawing Specific Insights from Data

The ability to capture data from every device, endpoint, and communication platform is only the first challenge today’s businesses face. Once organizations have access to all of this data, they need a way to consolidate it, and convert it into meaningful, actionable insights.

A full overview of your collaboration ecosystem can be valuable, but it’s also important to be able to drill down into different data points and concepts, to make intelligent decisions. Essentially, businesses need to be able to “segment” their data in meaningful ways, distinguishing insights by everything from meeting room time and capacity, to location, and more.

The ability to create use-case specific views of data is how companies can make more intelligent decisions about how to design their meeting rooms and invest in new technology.

The Solution?

Again, the right technology can offer a solution to this challenge. An effective solution for digital collaboration experience management will give organizations control over how they view and segment their data. With the right tools, companies should be able to identify specific use cases, and surface data relevant to the decisions they need to make.

With analytical tools, companies should be able to filter through their insights, and surface visualizations that guide them towards effective choices, such as how to structure new meeting room environments, or which devices they should give to team members to enable collaboration.

Challenge 3: Relying on Reactive, Rather than Proactive Strategies

Finally, though various technologies exist that can empower business leaders to collect data from multiple environments, and even filter the data based on their specific use cases, most solutions take a “reactive” approach. They offer valuable insights into historical information that can help companies improve resource utilization and productivity in the future.

However, many companies need to take a proactive approach to addressing issues in real-time, if they want to facilitate better collaboration, and enhance employee experiences. A reactive approach alone could lead to significant problems within the workplace, as employees struggle with unpredictable software and device issues.

Taking a proactive approach, on the other hand, allows companies to instantly recognize the roadblocks to effective collaboration when they happen. Ramirez says, “Proactive monitoring with real-time data allows companies to quickly resolve issues, minimizing disruptions and fostering a more productive work environment.”

The Solution?

To enable a proactive approach to enhancing collaboration, companies need to be able to access their data in real-time. This means investing in proactive monitoring tools that can track potential issues consistently, and alert business leaders when issues emerge with security, reliability, and performance.

An effective proactive monitoring solution will not only help companies to address the issues their team members face faster, but could also tackle a range of other issues in the business landscape. Proactive monitoring can reduce the risk of compliance issues and security breaches, and ensure companies can get the most value out of their systems.

Unlocking the True Power of Collaboration Data

According to Vyopta’s research, more than 100 million meetings occur every day, and organizations spend over $3 trillion each year to help their employees meet, share knowledge, and collaborate. As companies continue to invest heavily in enabling collaboration, it’s becoming increasingly crucial for these organizations to access the data and insights they need to optimize their return on investment.

Though many collaboration platforms and technologies come with their own reporting and analytical tools built in, these systems are often limited. They can fail to give companies the comprehensive view of their collaboration technology stack they need to make informed decisions. Additionally, they often don’t provide opportunities to drill down into data points based on use cases, or proactively resolve problems as they occur.

Fortunately, a comprehensive digital experience management platform can solve these challenges. With a solution like Vyopta’s platform, companies can overcome the hurdles that prevent them from unlocking the full value of their collaboration data, paving the way to better user experiences and reduced operational costs.



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