Business
collaboration is
IT's next horizon

Some workers might never return to the office.

Business leaders have been talking about this since the beginning of COVID-19 pandemic, when large swaths of the workforce moved from the office to working remotely from home in early 2020. For example, in Detroit's Henry Ford Health System, by August 2020, 96% of revenue cycle staff were working remotely, an increase of more than 70% pre-pandemic.

For many organizations, productivity and business collaboration were major concerns during the first few months of the pandemic. But more than a year later, as the reality of the remote workforce endures, many organizations have realized something amazing: With the right approach to collaboration, it's possible to discover—and even create—novel ways of doing business.

But the stakes are high, and they require more than an innovative business strategy. Challenges continue to loom including a rapidly changing remote work landscape, demand for digital relationships that ease worker burdens and a need to diversify capabilities and revenue streams. Optimizing conversation, collaboration and productivity fluidly across devices, platforms and applications is more important than ever.

When supported by a strong IT strategy, effective business collaboration ensures agility, enables true digital transformation and helps organizations navigate the constant change that characterizes today's business environment.

In a future shaped by post-pandemic ripples, remote work and a population shift away from major cities will incentivize companies across a range of industries to embrace emerging trends in business collaboration. Leveraging sophisticated business collaboration tools will help them solve high-stakes problems.

The future is fertile ground for extended reality and its immersive forms—chiefly, augmented reality, virtual reality and mixed reality. For instance, IKEA’s augmented shopping experience lets customers project virtual furniture into their homes through a smartphone app. Extended reality will be a key driver for the retail industry, redefining the point of service and shifting where purchases happen and where profit comes from.

In the new world of remote and distributed work, employees might encounter extended reality before they encounter a customer. Extended reality is emerging as a popular tool for employee training and learning and development initiatives.

As the very idea of how and where work gets done is transformed, businesses will need fresh ways of collaborating to support the complex relationship between customers and the support services that keep business moving.

Though often discussed separately, artificial intelligence (AI) and big data are converging, and businesses must understand how the two connect to address challenges in business workflows and the customer experience. No matter the industry, this requires cooperation between specialists across IT disciplines.

The pandemic has pushed the banking industry, for example, toward self-service kiosks that lean on conversational artificial intelligence to drive the customer experience. To extract the most value out of these technologies, data scientists will need to work with other IT professionals responsible for managing the massive data sets.

All this contributes to the need for unified communications and business collaboration tools that are mindful of user needs, organizational goals and the unique challenges that individual industries present.