Are enterprise meetings broken? – Cisco Blogs

It’s Monday morning. You’ve scheduled a call with key teams to prepare for a busy week.

From around the world, your team joins one by one.

Well, they try to anyway.

Some can’t find the invitation link. Or can’t get the tool to launch. Others don’t receive a calendar notification. Several find that their mobile device can’t connect; a few join without audio or video. One person tries to join on the wrong platform and finds no meeting at all.

Of the people that do attend, many report poor audio and video quality.

In the end, the meeting starts 10 minutes late. Some miss it entirely. And unfortunately, uneven call quality makes it more annoying than inspiring.

Solving today’s enterprise collaboration challenges starts with our new guide

The above scenario might be an exaggeration. But it’s based on the real-world difficulties that many teams experience: disconnected user experiences, disparate tools, and unpredictable call quality.

Our new eBook, Destination Collaboration: An Executive’s Guide to Optimizing Investments and Maximizing Productivity, provides key tips to help you solve these challenges.

Read today to learn how to enable the five critical elements of a successful enterprise collaboration strategy:

• Simplicity: Make the experience friction-less for both users and IT staff, regardless of device.
• Unity: Centralize tools, platforms, and architectures to better unite your team.
• Security: Rely on solutions you can trust and ensure users don’t circumvent IT.
• Clarity: Deliver audio and video quality that is reliably outstanding.
• Efficiency: Make it all happen without technology sprawl or unnecessary effort.

The guide also dissects the current challenges faced by many companies, including:

What’s really hindering enterprise collaboration

Today, enterprise organizations employ an average of seven different collaboration solutions. This sprawling set of tools creates user experience disconnects. And those ultimately drag down productivity and fuel collaboration frustration.

Too many tools, windows, and clicks turn working together into a very difficult task. Scheduling, joining, and following up on meetings become laborious; some users may prefer to avoid the hassle all together.

Supporting an inflated number of solutions both eats up IT staff’s time and increases IT expenses. Integration costs skyrocket. We’ve seen organizations spend up to 20+ percent more on IT because of hard-to-integrate collaboration solutions.

Meanwhile, lack of intelligent traffic shaping hinders real-time audio and video on internal networks. And enterprise organizations remain at the mercy of the large public cloud infrastructures leveraged by many collaboration providers—which make performance unpredictable.

A more unified and integrated approach

To provide the limitless, flexible digital workspace that increased reliance on remote work demands, organization’s need to reshape and revitalize their collaboration strategy.

Embracing cloud and seeking opportunities to integrate and centralize are the keys to success. Tools need to be consolidated so users have a single, familiar interface for all their communication needs. Scheduling, joining, and following up on meetings need to be effortless. Critical business applications such as Office 365 and ServiceNow need to be integrated with your platform so users can collaborate without breaking focus.

As you create a unified user experience and reduce solution sprawl, IT operations also become more streamlined. IT spending goes down. End-users are happier, more productive, and less likely to turn to solutions outside of IT’s control.

Now’s the time to start optimizing your strategy

Download the executive’s guide to optimizing and improving enterprise collaboration today.