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Close to 28% of Indian enterprises said their top goal from investing in collaborative technologies is to improve sales/revenue as compared to just 14% of enterprises globally. On the other hand, the top driver of collaborative technologies globally—enhancing individual productivity—stands at No 3 reason in India. These are some of the findings of the Connected Enterprise Report 2016, released by Dimension Data recently. The research is based on survey of 580 enterprise IT managers and 320 Line of Business managers globally.
The reasons—however surprising they look at first glance—are not difficult to explain. Indian businesses are more global. According to the research itself, almost double the respondents in India said they have global offices (30%) as compared to just 17% globally who said so. Also, 42% participating Indian enterprises said they do business with customers and partners spread in many countries globally, only 28% enterprises globally said so.
While this pretty much explains why collaborative technologies are directly related with closing sales/developing business in India more than in other countries, the relatively lower importance given to enhancing individual productivity too is understandable. Among the countries where the survey was conducted, India has one of the lowest labor cost, still. Individual productivity may not be a pressing issue for Indian enterprises—at least not yet.
It is clear Indian companies look for clear measurable advantages from investing in collaboration technologies. Improving sales, reducing business experience, improving individual employee productivity, faster decision making, and efficient business processes are top five drivers of collaborative technologies whereas teamwork, collaborative experience and other such intangible advantages get a lower priority. Is it because Indian businesses do not care for those or do not really need technology for those? That is anyone’s guess.
Indians, say the study, are also more open to go for hosted services, particularly public cloud. “For enterprise voice, video and audio conferencing, the proportion of Indian organizations willing to adopt a shared multi tenanted model were 12%, 6% and 6% respectively, double the average globally,“ says the report. This means that RoI is still a major measure of investment.
The study also reveals that like their counterparts in other countries, about 61% of Indian organizations have a defined collaboration strategy, and at more than 40% of these organizations, there’s a single company-wide strategy, opposed to a strategic variance by business unit. CIOs and IT Directors are the main decision-makers when it comes to choosing and implementing collaboration technology, but they are sharing that responsibility with line of business managers and other non-IT executives within the organization, as in the rest of world. Consumer-grade collaboration applications (Facebook, WhatsApp etc) are used widely in the workplace, the study further confirms.
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