Enterprise Collaboration: Reaping the Benefits of the Mid-Office
The desire to optimize business practices and improve operational
efficiencies is no new phenomenon. Business and information technology
initiatives have long attempted to bring about positive change for the
entire business. These initiatives tend to focus exclusively on one of
two places: either on the transactional databases and enterprise
systems of the back office or on the front office where workers
interact with customers and business partners with desktop software and
Web applications geared towards enhancing personal productivity.
The myopic focus of these advances almost wholly ignores the
importance of the mid-office. What’s more, those few executives
who do focus on this vital portion of the enterprise typically view
on-demand collaboration for the mid-office as nothing more than a means
of keeping track of a snarl of unrelated tasks and deadlines. This
ignores the reality that enterprise collaboration and work management
is about driving value for the business from end to end.
Although enterprise resource planning and customer relationship
management systems have grown in popularity over the past few years,
collaborative business software can provide better business results and
insights into operational processes. To clarify, the hodge-podge of
scheduling, resource management, project management and portfolio
management applications that have proliferated to the point of near
ubiquity are insufficient.
Properly applied, these tools have the ability to unlock valuable
troves of intellectual property and knowledge that had been sequestered
in mid-office business processes. Proper application requires highly
flexible and adaptable customization and ultimately provides the
enterprise with new insights into organizational and business
efficiencies. This frontier represents a profound competitive advantage
just waiting to be tapped.
Part One: The Front Office
The myriad bells and whistles of the front office are geared towards
the creation of information. Employees in the front office deal in the
currency of documents, spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, e-mail
messages, audio and video files and other forms of unstructured data.
This deluge accumulates on computers, servers, flash drives, and CDs
across the enterprise and – with the proliferation of laptops and
other facilitators for employees to work remotely – outside of
the enterprise itself. This fosters chaos.
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