A collaboration platform, and specifically a cloud solution, is the basic prerequisite to be able to rely on shared data management and have access to it anytime and anywhere, even on the move. And it is precisely on the basis of this prerequisite that the concept of the distributed office is concretely developed.
Through a collaboration platform, business activities and entire processes can be managed. In fact, inone centralized workspace, information, documents and communications can be made available to everyone. Having a tool that gives each person involved in a certain job and the managers a complete view of workflows translates for the organization into the valuable opportunity to check in real time the progress of tasks,alignment against objectives and, from a more practical point of view, what priorities to focus on, what is the most correct allocation of resources and so on.
A collaboration platform is, moreover, basic for hybrid work, as it is the container from which to draw what is needed to carry out one's tasks outside the office, while, among other things, keeping abreast of the work of other colleagues who are cooperating on joint projects.
What is the distributed office and what support a collaboration platform offers
The concept of the dispersed office expresses a new way of working that goes beyond the walls of a room to occupy the entire corporate office and expands to people's homes, allowing people to stay connected and operational at all times as if they were in a traditional workspace.
The pandemic, with the resulting social distancing obligations, has broken down so many cultural barriers related to smart working. In fact, the Smart working Observatory of the Politecnico di Milano has indicated that although the vaccination campaign is decreasing the number of smart workers, it is expected that in the post-pandemic period there will be 4.38 million agile workers adopting hybrid formulas, with 2 or 3 smart working days per week.
Collaboration platform: buzzwords Cloud and integration
WHEREAS, to build such a (virtual) space, one needs hardware devices (pc, tablet, possibly headset and camera) and connectivity, it is then imperative to have a collaboration platform to put applications and resources guaranteed to workers. To do this, the collaboration platform will have to have among its main requirements, certainly one of the absolute protagonists of recent times: the Cloud. The "Cloud" is what allows the platform to be always up-to-date and makes it easy to work remotely and on the move. In addition, a Cloud collaboration platform does not require proprietary infrastructure but is used "as a Service": it is delivered as a service by a vendor specialized in this area that maintains and evolves the solution.
The second essential requirement for a collaboration platform is that it must be integrable. A collaboration platform must be able to dialogue with all enterprise applications from ERP to CRM (passing, if there are any, through PLM - product lifecycle management software, IoT - Internet of Things systems, and so on) so that everything needed can be made available to each collaborator.
Flexible, technologically advanced and safe
To create a distributed office that fully adapts to each organization's mode of operation, it is necessary for the collaboration platform to be easily customizable to be quickly adopted and not require high specific skills for its use. For this, it must offer users maximum flexibility of use, to allow it to be used by any business function, without overburdening IT beyond that.
A plus that characterizes and distinguishes one collaboration platform from others, then, is the technology component. Features for automating processes or part of a process (such as low-value-added or routine tasks) and artificial intelligence, for example, to correlate and then obtain information from data, make the collaboration platform a competitive factor from the point of view of productivity and greater overall efficiency.
Last but not least, there is the security factor to consider: a dispersed office is protected and, in turn, keeps the company's information assets safe when the cloud collaboration platform is a service delivered from secure data centers and allows ad hoc policies and access rules to be implemented for each professional profile employed in the company.
