Cloud collaboration brings together new advances in cloud computing and collaboration that are becoming more and more necessary in firms operating in an increasingly globalized world.
Cloud computing is a marketing term for technologies that provide software, data access, and storage services that do not require end-user knowledge of the physical location and configuration of the system that delivers the services.
A parallel to this concept can be drawn with the electricity grid, where end-users consume power without needing to understand the component devices or infrastructure required to utilize the technology.
Collaboration, in this case, refers to the ability of workers in a company to work together simultaneously on a particular task. In the past, most document collaboration would have to be completed face to face. However, collaboration has become more complex, with the need to work with people all over the world in real time on a variety of different types of documents, using different devices.
While growth in the collaboration sector is still growing rapidly, it has been noted that the uptake of cloud collaboration services has reached a point where it is less to do with the ability of current technology, and more to do with the reluctance of workers to collaborate in this way.
A report by Erica Rugullies mapped out five reasons why workers are reluctant to collaborate more.These are:
- People resist sharing their knowledge.
- Users are most comfortable using e-mail as their primary electronic collaboration tool.
- People do not have incentive to change their behaviour.
- Teams that want to or are selected to use the software do not have strong team leaders who push for more collaboration.
- Senior management is not actively involved in or does not support the team collaboration initiative.
As a result, many providers of cloud collaboration tools have created solutions to these problems. These include the integration of email alerts into collaboration software and the ability to see who is viewing the document at any time. All the tools a team could need are put into one piece of software so workers no longer have to rely on email based solutions.
