Video collaboration is necessary for SMB business agility – decision agility, innovation agility

It is common knowledge that cloud is being adopted by SMBs and midmarket businesses for business agility. Techaisle’s SMB & midmarket cloud adoption study data shows that 80 percent of SMBs consider cloud to be contributing to business growth and video-enabled collaboration is playing an ever-increasing role in contributing to business agility for high-growth and innovative businesses. But why?

Because Innovation happens best in collaboration and not in isolation.

High-growth, highly innovative SMBs and midmarket businesses differ greatly from low-growth firms in their use of advanced collaboration technologies. High-growth firms pursue a wide range of collaboration-related benefits – more rapid decision-making capacity, improved employee productivity, richer engagement with customers, and better internal collaboration – and make extensive use of face-to-face (F2F) video systems.

Techaisle survey data shows that initial centricity of file sharing is giving way to rich in-person interactive communications in collaboration strategies.

What are the key elements of a collaboration framework that can help IT decision makers (ITDMs) and business decision makers (BDMs) come to a mutual understanding of how, where and why to use video-enabled collaboration solutions, in particular, F2F video? To answer this question, Techaisle conducted a survey of 1,269 ITDMs and BDMs with SMBs and midmarket businesses, across the US, Latin America, Europe, and Asia Pacific.

Techaisle’s research identified key characteristics that distinguish these low-growth, moderate growth and high-growth/innovative businesses. As figure below demonstrates, use of face-to-face video (F2F video) is correlated with important outcomes within their businesses. Collectively, these attributes align strongly with market success. Techaisle’s research found that the high adopters of video grew nearly 2X faster than other low or non-adopters and they reported even more benefits from using video than slower growing businesses. By using video-enabled collaboration there are only upsides for businesses.

With an emphasis on speed of innovation high-growth and innovative businesses use modern collaboration solutions that connect people-to-people in a face-to-face setting by using video-enabled collaboration solutions.

Connecting video collaboration with high-growth business attributes

While these statistics are compelling, an even more telling trend emerges from the Techaisle research when the business attitudes of innovative, high-growth SMBs and midmarket businesses are compared with the benefits of video collaboration solutions.

Figure below presents the perspectives. Listed on the left are the key attitudinal attributes of highly successful firms. As the findings highlighted in green illustrate, effective, efficient collaboration is part of these firms’ corporate DNA. As the right-hand side of figure shows, the benefits of video collaboration are integral to success in driving decision agility and the trust that underlies effective teamwork. High-performing firms report that they use F2F video to drive faster decision making, improved productivity, more personal interaction, better teamwork and seamless idea exchange and collaboration.

The nature of the collaboration discussion is changing. Collaboration isn’t a means of satisfying abstract internal demands for information organization or generic upgrades. Advanced collaboration technologies like F2F video provide answers to real business issues – issues that will become more pressing if they are not addressed before leading-edge competitors have permanently rewritten stakeholder expectations for productivity, innovation and customer interaction.

The survey findings provide guidance to SMBs and midmarket decision makers on how the nature of the collaboration discussion is changing, drive acceptance and use of F2F video throughout their organization to maximize business payback and align objectives with the outcomes that shape the activities of high-growth innovative firms who are the most successful users of advanced collaboration technology.