Dramatic Return on Collaboration Investments

A just released study by Frost & Sullivan, sponsored by Cisco and Verizon, finds a dramatic return on investment in advanced collaboration tools. The authors developed a model for measuring return on collaboration investment, or the ROC index. They found that companies realized an average ROC of 4.2, meaning a return of four times on collaboration investments. High performance companies with high level of collaboration technology deployment and utilization showed and ROC of 6.2, and low performing companies with collaboration technology deployment and utilization realized an ROC of 2.8. The study appears to be focused more on unified communication (UC), although the authors refer to it as unified communication and collaboration (UC&C). We need further details to comment on this aspect.

Other findings of the study are:

• Companies deploying UC&C are more successful than their peers who do not.
• 40% of companies deploying UC&C plan to increase spending, and 80% of companies that have not deployed UC&C plan to do so in the next 2-3 years.
• Workers have a love-hate relationship with technology, and feel that collaboration technologies can help manage stress.
• Web conferencing is gaining traction, and so it telecommuting.

Some more information on the study is available at the Industry Standard.

Update on 24 December 2010 by Lokesh Datta

See Related Posts:

• The Four Ps of Effective Collaboration
• Learning from Real-Life Collaboration Stories
• Short Stories From The Front
• Mind the “Collaboration Gap”
• Mind the “Collaboration Trap”