If the world didn’t change business would be easy. Nothing ever stays the same and certainly not in today’s business environment. The need for speed and adaptation has never been more pressing but still most medium and large companies are very slow to adapt to changing business conditions. Most Executives get this and are exploring solutions that bring agility and flexibility into their organizations.
Meanwhile, today’s corporations are built to have a single view of their customers. Segmented data resides in individual departments and is not easily federated across the organization. There are too many unconnected systems, silo databases and laborious processes with countless parochial interests and needs. This predicament slows decision making and project execution while rarely providing management with lessons learned to course correct in the future.
In general, when Executives want performance figures on each of the lines of business it’s typically done haphazardly or by asking for specific reports which take weeks to create. This is analogous to the 18th century naval voyages where discovery was taking place but expedition reports didn’t come back for months. In today’s economic environment where acquiring, servicing and retaining customers is paramount, you are at a competitive disadvantage if you don’t have a real-time federated view of the enterprise.
What are the Benefits to Data Integration?
According to a Forrester Consulting study, improved data availability across applications and projects provided project teams with better access to distributed data. The resulting lower costs can range from an estimated 20 percent savings in Year 1, increasing to 35 percent in Year 5. If you’re in the Executive ranks of a medium to large company, you understand the frustrations of meeting your goals only to find another department has fallen behind on their initiatives. This data awareness latency can severely impact major product launches, meeting sales objectives and compliance/risk management issues.
Why Collaborative Networks for Intranets?
The MindTouch Collaborative Intranet is an enterprise tool that connects people to data, projects and documents. Employees use the Intranet to quickly access information relevant to their job functions. They use the site to create projects in which to collaborate with teams to get things done. They store shared documents in which to collaborate and can access data from enterprise systems to monitor their department’s performance.
Collaborative Intranets present the organization with a 360 view of the enterprise. MindTouch creates a “single point of truth” about each line of business by connecting isolated data into one centralized view. Since a broader enterprise picture is now available, companies can be much more agile and quickly adapt to changing business conditions. In the past, companies would pay ISV’s millions for this real time view while having to pay hundreds of thousands more for minor updates. Starting today, you can realize the benefits for a fraction of the cost.
We have put a ton of work into creating a usable Collaborative Intranet and we couldn’t be more excited. MindTouch is growing rapidly and it’s developing solutions that companies need in this difficult economic environment to increase revenue and cut costs. Please join us at our weekly webinar to see why Collaborative Intranets are not just social networks designed to create social connections, but are built specifically for the enterprise to solve mission critical business problems.
