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Not many companies have full control over the data that flows between their teams and individual team members. I’m not talking about securing it. I’m talking about managing it in a way that it can be searched for, located, and used in seconds – rather than hours.

Picture this. Many companies today still rely on clunky desktops, email, and even desk phones to create, process, and swap data back and forth. While it may have worked 10 years ago, it’s no longer a viable solution in today’s technically-advanced and much faster-paced marketplace. So where does that leave companies that still rely on legacy management solutions? In a trail of dust, of course. What can be done to get back in the game? If your answer was ‘get new tech,’ you nailed it!

Redesigning collaboration from the ground up

Research has shown that your typical employee flushes about 20 percent of their time down the drain just trying to locate information inside of their organization. Crazy, right? If those who manage the business can’t get a grip on things, imagine what the customer is left with in terms of product, or service quality.

But it’s not the end of the world. This is the norm in today’s typical workplace (though things are poised to make a U turn soon enough). A company may have an intranet portal that staffers leverage to access a myriad of resources. A working team might use a custom applications to achieve CRM, project management, marketing or sales-related objectives. So far so good. But when it comes to communicating this data back and forth, and working with it to produce new goods and services, things tend to go haywire.

Years ago, discipline was the #1 solution to this problem. Today, you no longer have to breathe down your employer’s neck. Grab your collaboration solution of choice (fancy some Hubgets?) and let the software do its thing while your workforce does its thing.

A data + communications hub

Specialized collaboration apps centralize information collected from disparate sources and channels across your organization. Employees can use it not only to search for and use the data in seconds, but also to talk in real time and stay up to date on any file exchange or incremental update.

Whether it’s two people or two dozen employees who are working on a project, everyone can converse and share information to accelerate decision making and business improvement processes. Departments can engage in a stream of real-time communications to update team members on new deliverables, to share docs in one centralized location (i.e. minutes from a weekly team meeting, a new sales contract, a revised marketing campaign) and to ask questions for internal development. You can even loop customers, partners and subject matter experts in conversation tracks or audio/video conferences without compromising on security.

So when you think cloud collaboration, don’t think upgrade – think revolution of the first order!