News / All news / Google: Mobile, social, cloud changing the way we work

This article is based on Sebastien Marotte’ s opinion, VP, Google Enterprise, EMEA who thinks that mobile technologies and tablets penetrate our life and change the way we work.

Sebastien Marotte is responsible for leading sales teams across EMEA, developing business strategy and identifying new growth opportunities for Google Enterprise in the region.

Because of the explosion of social media and mobile and cloud computing the speed at which ideas can be generated, tested is accelerating faster than we could have anticipated.  

Even now for most people, communicating and collaborating in an online world have become the norm - organizing a party, sharing news and views or coming together to fundraise is commonplace. The tools that make it easy to connect, share, recommend, like, advise and work together online are now available in the workplace and transform the way we work.

To help understand this workplace transformation, Google commissioned an international study with The Future Foundation for 3,500 employees across the UK, France, Germany, Japan and the USA, plus 12 experts in innovation and business transformation. Based on this, there are three areas where new technologies will dramatically alter future working practices.

Communication and collaboration

Mobile, social, and cloud technologies allow us to collaborate on projects across borders.

Organizations using new technologies (on-line conferences, on-line presentations, tablets and etc.) will reap the benefits versus those that stay stuck in silos.

Our study identified a clear 81% correlation between collaboration and innovation, revealing for example, thatUKemployees who are given the opportunity to collaborate at work are almost twice as likely to have contributed new ideas to their company. In the future, innovation will increasingly emerge from different directions, both inside and outside of an organization, and more value will be placed on the quality of ideas generated.

100% mobile web business world

Mobile technologies and the consumerisation of IT will fuel the move to collaborative working. According to the statistics only 12% of employees are satisfied with the technology available to them at work, preferring the more intuitive tools they use in their personal lives, and nearly a half (46%) do not believe their employer makes the best use of technology to enhance productivity and performance.

Businesses will no longer own or manage servers or client software, and can spend their time on things that create competitive advantage. For the next generation of workers, this will be the norm, as educational organizations are early adopters of this 100% web approach.

Claires Court School, England, is using Google Apps, the cloud-based suite of collaboration and communications tools plus Chromebooks, which are built and optimised to be a portal to the web, to share information and work on projects from any location.

Going social

It is clear that whether organizations like it or not, social tools are here to stay. The challenge is finding ways for staff to use them to improve productivity, increase sales and build professional and personal networks. Increasingly, rather than seeing them as a distraction, companies will capitalise on them.

We will see a move towards a working culture more focused on encouraging ideas and innovation.

Those companies that use online collaboration and communication to their advantage and embrace the desire from their employees to use the same technologies they use in their personal lives at work will be the most successful.

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk