From telephone and e-mail in the 20th century to unified communication and enterprise social networks in the
21st, businesses have long applied the latest technology in the hopes of improving efficiency and productivity.
When this happens successfully, the investment turns in sufficient business impact to justify the cost. When it
doesn't, businesses eventually try something else.
Why would enterprises continue to do this decade after decade, when many of these experiments fail or times
inevitably change? It's because interaction and collaboration amongst employees is the very lifeblood of the
typical businesses. Data consistently shows that good collaboration can have dramatic consequences (http://cdnstatic.
zdnet.com /i/story/60/39/002055/higher_social_business_benefits_for_fully_networked_organizations.png) in terms of
business results, from minor efficiencies that might enable the delivery of cheaper products to market, all the way
up to the creation of game-changing new advances that can remake an entire industry. The question then, is how
to best lay down a long-term strategy that will continually engage employees through the inevitable changes,
innovations, and disruptions in the marketplace.
One of today's biggest challenges in doing this is sheer choice: The palette of potential technologies and products
(http://www.zdnet.com /the-m ajor-enterprise-collaboration-platform s-and-their-m obile-clients-7000018519/) that purport to
make it easier for workers to communicate and collaborate has become at best an embarrassment of riches and at
worst an impenetrable morass of options. At the same time, there's also a growing realization that technology by
itself does have real limits in how much it can fundamentally improve the human condition in the workplace.
In the process of applying technology, we can't forget that workforce engagement, the measure of whether an
employee merely does the minimum required of them, versus proactively driving innovation and new value for the
organization, is the ultimate objective here. Thus, engagement can only ever be partially accounted for by
deploying the latest new collaborative technology, and probably significantly less than many of its proponents
would have you believe.