Ask any big corporation or a young startup about which tools they use within the organization, you will most likely find more than one. Thanks to freely available tools such as Evernote, LiveChat, Jive, Yammer etc, there’s no dearth of collaboration tools. Yet, how many times do organizations really save time and resources using these?
That’s when comes the scope of an exclusive enterprise collaboration tool that suits ONLY your organizational system. But here’s the catch: a lot of thought should go into planning and implementing such a tool.

Enterprise collaboration is much more than what it’s made out to be. Its full potential is realized by those organizations that put a lot of efforts in the thinking process before implementing.

Tying business goals with social collaboration

The foremost factor in planning an enterprise collaboration would be to spell out business objectives - what problem are you trying to solve and what problems would the enterprise software solve. Unless you align your strategic goals with the collaboration software, you shouldn’t move forward for any kind of enterprise collaboration.

Making user flows

Your employees will be your users. Do you know their problems? Are you aware of their challenges, hurdles and gaps in communication? We advise that you first make some user profiles by foreseeing how and why the employees would want to use enterprise collaboration tool, and which of their problems will it solve. This will help you choose the right vendor who understands your users as well as you do and will hand you a built-for-purpose enterprise software.

Create a strong communication environment

The most effective collaboration tool would fail if your organization does not have an easy flow of communication. You must have the confidence of your employees way before you even think of a collaboration platform. There must be channels of communication at various levels at the organization hierarchy so that there are no loopholes where information disappears.

Choosing the right enterprise software development partner

This is the make-or-break decision especially for enterprise collaboration software. Your vendors must have a deeper thinking process that you do and should be at the same wavelength. In fact, look for a team that’s like an extension of your own planning team. This would pay off especially at the time of implementation because such a partner would develop an enterprise software from the user point of view.
Enterprise collaboration platform is not a factor that you can work on a trial-and-errors method. It either works right the first time or it doesn’t, so think it through.