Innovate to collaborate: The technology revolution changing communication
A few weeks ago I travelled out to a client with one of my solutions specialists. Being on the road is always a good time to spend learning about your colleagues but a car journey around our great region can leave you with a fairly long amount of time to fill.
We started talking about technology and he brought up a story that made me think about how far we’ve come. On the weekends he plays in a band and he was telling me about the way they rehearse. For these guys gone are the days of the old school rehearsal where everyone has to be in the one place. Through technology, everyone in the band is able to practice in the comfort of his or her own home, playing the same music. Think of time saved in travel alone: No need to pack your gear, travel to rehearsal, unpack, play, and then go through the process in reverse!
It’s a good example of how technology has changed the way we do things. We can now do so much without the cost and time burden of travel theses days. It also made me think about how vital communication is to business.
Communication is crucial to success
For all of us in business, there’s plenty of evidence to suggest how important strong communication is, both internally within our team and with our customers. The ability to communicate effectively across large geographic boundaries is nothing new. We’ve all had to work with teams across different towns, cities, states or even countries.
It wasn’t that long ago that a phone call was the quickest way to get in touch, and while I’m still a fan of jumping on the phone, the fact is the landscape around how we communicate has changed. The digitisation age we’re in has revolutionised communication; the NBN, despite its initially problems, will hopefully change it even further. This digital revolution has enabled innovation to change the game. It’s meant that both in our private and working lives we expect everything now. We want to be able to communicate effectively anywhere, anytime, without barriers.
Face to face communication will always be the preference for the vast majority of us. But with the cost and lost productivity time in getting to and from wherever it is you need to be, it’s easy to see why the alternatives are so attractive.
New age collaboration
The way we collaborate has been completely changed by technology and in my opinion it’s a huge improvement on where we’ve been in the past. Think about video: The rise of Skype has revolutionised the videoconference. What was once an expensive and costly piece of technology is now accessible to anyone. Video is growing in importance in the way we communicate, but still has its limitations.
We’ve seen it in our own business with the rise of collaboration tools. We use a variety of smart board options in our business. They allow us to share a digital whiteboard across any number of locations, allowing everyone to not only see what we’re writing on the whiteboard but to actively participate and add content. You can even save and send the whiteboard notes to all participants as a PDF, or even save the notes from a meeting and then instantly throw them back on the screen at your next catch up. Saves someone rubbing off your whiteboard notes by mistake!
The key take away for me is that there’s so many ways to collaborate today, whether you’re a garage band or a small business with 5 different office locations. Mobility and technology have freed up our ability to work anywhere, adding in strong collaboration just makes it easier to work with the people we need to get the job done.