Stop, Collaborate, and Listen: 4 Reasons Why Your Company Needs a Collaboration Software Upgrade

Microsoft’s $1.2 billion purchase of Yammer only confirms how crucial enterprise social networks and collaboration software is now and will be in the future.

“By far, the number-one business driver for most organizations is being able to connect colleagues across teams and geographies,” writes social business advisor Jacob Morgan, author of The Collaborative Organization. “Why do organizations need to connect their employees via internal social networks, wikis, or workspaces when they can just e-mail one another or call one another on the phone?” he asks. For starters, because in this hyper-competitive marketplace, increased flexibility and responsiveness may just mean the difference between success and falling behind the competition.

In this guest post for Fast Company, Morgan identifies four major reasons why your business should stop relying on email for the type of communication and collaboration it was never meant for. “Sharing knowledge and information in this way is very inefficient,” Morgan writes. “Using e-mail causes problems with versioning, content duplication, reaching the right people, and locating the proper information later, among a host of other annoying problems.”

Emergent collaborative platforms, meanwhile, allows an organization to develop new ideas, generate feedback, iterate, and share/transfer institutional knowledge in powerful ways.