Communication and employee engagement in the corporate enterprise is broken and has been for a long time.
The truth is, most people still work like its 1995. Everyone's locked in departmental silos and no one communicates or shares information with each other. Existing tools like legacy enterprise systems and email are failing.
The good news is that a ton of innovation is about to hit the enterprise front and center. The enterprise if ripe for innovation and there's huge profit opportunity here too - the Enterprise Collaboration Market in North America alone is expected to reach $34.74 billion by 2019.
Add the Facebook At Work secret project to Cicso's Project Squared to IBMs new mail platform IBM Verse to Igloo Software, Jive, and Share Point, etc. and you can see how the space is growing. Fingers crossed that all this innovation will bring solutions that really solve problems going forward.
Good thing, too, because the millennial BYOD (bring-your-own-device) generation is getting impatient. Here's the trends to watch in 2015:
1.SMAC - the convergence of social, mobile, analytics, and cloud. None of this would be possible without each one of these technologies coming together. One IBM executive told me that their new IBM Verse product will "help companies go social without even knowing it." In other words, integrate what's useful from social platforms and leave behind the angst of 'going social'.
2.Workplace transformation. The boomers are aging out and their way of working is going with them. Here come the millennials in droves. They have a totally new approach to solving problems. Just take Slack, as an example. "Slack is so beloved that some companies have begun mentioning it as an employment perk alongside on-site massages and bottomless bacon-tray Fridays in their job listings," says a recent profile of the company in Wired.
3.Unlocking Internal Intelligence. Companies that are already experimenting with collaboration are pleased with the results. Employee engagement increases and companies are realizing that their brand must resonate internally as well as externally to attract and retain the talent needed to go forward.
In 2015 the workplace that is built to support interaction, collaborative working, creativity, innovation, flexibility and mentorship will THRIVE. Your company has a choice: Ignore the trend or embrace the trend.
Beverly Macy is the CEO of Gravity Summit LLC, a strategic advisory firm located in Beverly Hills. She also teaches at UCLA Anderson School of Management and is the author of The Power of Real-Time Social Media Marketing.