Make your business smarter - collaboration, integration and analytics with SmartOffice®

Improve Your Business Dynamics– Collaboration, Analytics and Integration in a Smart Office
As digital technology continues to evolve, and the value of collaboration, mobility, cloud and data analytics becomes perceptible, it is critical for businesses to adopt the most current procedures and tools for their growth. Besides imbibing these new mechanisms, a business also must ensure that they are well integrated and centrally controlled. This is the centralidea of smart offices.

How will the offices feel in ten years from now? What will the employees, customers and stakeholders expect to see when they enter your business premises? The changes that are evolving nowindicate one thing clearly– that the workplaces will exhibit a great deal of connected technology.

Enterprises of all sizes have started imbibing innovations such as mixed reality, IoT and artificial intelligence (AI) in their revenue-generating activities. These companies also want to apply similar techniques for their workplace management to reduce costs and the occasions of downtime, while improving employee productivity and satisfaction.

The Need for Better Collaboration Tools
On one side, we have large organisations spread across a global marketplace and getting dispersed into different regions. On the other, there are smaller companies, which may not have expanded from their bases but are willing to hire skilled employees fromother cities and give them the flexibility to work from home or remote locations. Workplace collaboration technologies help to connect far-flung teams in both these scenarios.

A demand for collaboration apps also comes from the younger and social media-savvy generation of workers. The inability of email messages to handle communication overload is another problem that employees face today.

Craig Le Clair, a principal analyst for enterprise architecture at Forrester Research, has analysed that by the year 2020, 50 percent of the global workers will comprise the millennials. These people have grown up on digital tools, and texting, instant messaging, Wikipedia, Twitter and Facebook are basic online utilities for them. They receive an overwhelming quantity of email that must be opened, read, replied to, forwarded or deleted. The workers, therefore, prefer customised tools that make it easier for them to stay organised and, wherever possible, automate a part of the workload.

Technology is only a part of the solution to address this challenge. Smooth collaboration in a smart office also depends on the culture of the organisation.

Reinforcing Analytics for Better Decision-Making
Another dimension required for a smart, future-ready workplace is business data analytics. It is related to every aspect of an enterprise – from financial projections to customer experience and everything in between. Data analytics offers information vital for business decisions that affect revenue generation and profitability.

For startups and small businesses a balanced combination of data analytics is important because of various reasons – their employees typically have multiple roles, the business processes keep changing, and they need to continually attract more customers to thrive in their industries and compete with bigger players.

In essence, data analytics is the method of considering the information that your organisation generates. It helps to uncover patterns in customer behaviour, changes in the market and other nonevident industry trends. Although data analytics has some common elements with big data, it focuses more on smaller and structured datasets.

The data analytics capabilities that most SMEs need are:

• Ease of use
• Dataset creation to pull the data from different sources so it can be tailored and made ready for display and investigation
• Dashboards for interactive visualisation
• Interactive exploration for customised data views
• Social platform integration

The simplest way to introduce data analytics in businesses is to get a digital app or custom software that can automate the process. Such tools should be able to extract data from your website and social media platforms, as also from your accounts and CRM systems, to offer insights on how a business is doing and how it can improve.

Integration – a Key to Optimising Smart Offices
The IT frameworks and tools that you deploy for better communication, collaboration, mobility and data analytics in your organisation can function only when they work in unison. A smart office does not have a siloed approach towards its operations and processes. The integration of all systems is essential to growth, and it is from here that the concept of office-in-a-box arises.

Tata Tele Business Services has designed SmartOffice® as an integrated package containing IP-PBX, data modem, Wi-Fi router, firewalls and Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) server. It not only enables SMEs to create their voice, data and network architecture easily but also helps them manage their enterprise apps for collaboration and analytics together in the cloud. It is a secure and scalable solution that helps businesses optimise their productivity and growth to lead in their industries and drive better customer experiences.