Solutions
Virtual Workspace
Meetings have many purposes: discussion, collaboration, decision-making… but suffer from a number of issues including creating a need to travel, being deferred due to schedule constraints, running out of time, not having all relevant information available. Audio conferencing and video conferencing can help but do not provide a satisfactory alternative on their own.
Virtual Meeting Space
Desktop videoconferencing deployed with collaborative tools for reviewing presentations and other documents can provide a rich user experience for a virtual meeting. But this is only one option.
So-called Web 2.0 technologies provide collaborative tools that can be easily deployed in user-friendly and user-definable web portals. These tools include wikis (online knowledge bases worked on collaboratively), blogs (online commentary tool enabling feedback by readers), and mash-ups (applications created by bringing together data and applications from many sources). The effect is a bottom-up approach to knowledge management and collaboration. Benefits include flexibility and the ability for workers to communicate and collaborate at a time that suits each of them.
Inflexible company intranets can be replaced by these technologies relatively quickly.
Workflow
Business processes can be managed by automated workflow management tools. Processes can be defined and automated actions created to alert co-workers or managers, request approvals, or initiate further processes. Workflow functionality can be implemented with document management and collaborative applications (including service-oriented Web 2.0 applications) to improve productivity and manage business processes more effectively.
Graphical mapping of processes can be integrated within the architecture. Communications enablement of the solution adds a further productivity dimension
NEC has the expertise and solutions to guide organsations in taking advantage of these tools that support business process improvements.