Cognitive Collaboration in the Digital Workplace
March 10, 2022
In this blog post we interview Jeff Graham, Chief Strategy Officer at VOSS, to get an insight into VOSS’ perspective on the emerging cognitive collaboration market.
What is cognitive collaboration?
According to UC Today, cognitive collaboration is the practice of applying specific behavioral guidelines to an environment, giving staff the support and guidance they need to create a better atmosphere that improves collaboration.
Cognitive collaboration, originating from Cisco, completely transforms the way we think about company culture. It helps employers find ways to improve the employee experience and remove any factors that are detrimental to productivity.
Cisco set the ball rolling by acquiring and developing many complementary technologies to their Webex platform including integrating their video suite into it. As a result, services such as natural language processing, “web-crawled” data results and AI, all worked to enhance the overall experience of collaboration. It provides users with a much more customized and improved experience, and cognitive collaboration was born.
What impact does cognitive collaboration have on the digital workplace?
A major impact is on collaboration tool utilization and uptake. By making the collaboration experience easier and more pleasant, cognitive collaboration encourages users to adopt collaboration tools faster. It unlocks productivity gains and efficiencies. In the short term, we will see many additional features and technologies added to this space, from Cisco and other vendors.
What opportunities does this present?
UC operations management (VOSS Automate) – The VOSS value proposition of increasing productivity and improving efficiency applies here. Automation of configurations, end user profile provisioning, and ongoing management are absolutely critical to realizing the full potential of the collaboration tool. If the initial turnup and subsequent management of the technology is perceived to be more difficult than the advantages gleaned from it, then it will not be a successful product.
UC performance management (VOSS Insights) – VOSS’ ability to provide rich insights into the uptake and usage of collaboration tools, along with keeping those environments healthy, is critical to overall business productivity. Knowing how the services are being utilized gives the advantage of being able to successfully plan future rollouts and the ability to focus training for those areas. Of course, ensuring the uptime of the collaboration tool along with a quality experience is paramount to getting the full value from it.
What are the potential threats of cognitive collaboration?
Your performance management platform plays a critical role in helping you to manage privacy settings, and reporting on any related issues. The goal of cognitive collaboration is to personalize the employee experience which in turn can run the risk of pushing privacy boundaries. Your performance management tools can help you successfully navigate this tricky path.
How can businesses benefit from cognitive collaboration?
Zoom fatigue (sometimes called virtual fatigue) refers to the exhaustion you feel after any kind of video call or conference. Much of this is due to the way collaboration tools are utilized in a very stale manner. The idea of harnessing the knowledge you gain from cognitive collaboration to provide your staff with a highly intuitive collaboration experience will solve this issue. It will also improve the overall productivity of the user. Hybrid / remote work is not going away, and businesses will need to benefit from the insights that cognitive collaboration can bring. This will help to keep the workforce happy and improve productivity.
What does the future hold?
It will be interesting to see where vendors such as Microsoft and Cisco take their offerings. These technology giants have the advantage of controlling a significant portion of the deployed infrastructure that allows them to integrate and enhance their offerings. I also think we’ll see much more M&A activity in the space to speed up time to delivery of complementary solutions.
