The word in business productivity today is “collaboration.” It’s an effort to induce departments and employees to do a better job of sharing knowledge to boost efficiency, eliminate redundant work and generally reap the benefits of dynamic brainstorming between knowledge workers. In its earliest iterations, “collaboration” meant “interoffice chat.” While it’s important to provide ways for workers to communicate with one another easily throughout the day, collaboration is about far more than chat.

Workers today may require documents, video, graphics and charts, presentations, social media posts, calendars, Web sites, video conferencing and much more. To be able to communicate whole ideas, they need to be able to share all these pieces of a project puzzle. In order for the collaboration to remain orderly and understandable (and not devolve into confused chaos), a collaboration solution needs to have a logical structure and solid foundation to help the shared information become intelligence instead of noise. This is vital, because a true collaboration solution will ideally benefit nearly every department of the company, and these departments might have their own distinct cultures and procedures.

Tim Dorey, CEO of Windsor, Ontario-based Noodle, says next-generation collaboration solutions will also be important for innovation because they offer “bottom up communications.”

“Historically, ideas in a company come from the top,” he told TMCnet. “With new software and services, great ideas can come from anyone at any level in the company. This is powerful and a true competitive advantage.”

Unified communications solutions, where collaboration often resides, have gone a long way toward enabling companies to foster the kind of sharing they envision. According to Dorey, however, most companies still have a long way to go, largely because of entrenched business practices.

“We speak with companies every day that are still working on technology adoption and improving overall communications,” he said. “It sounds basic, but there is still many companies with the idea that ‘this is how we always do it.’ I would say consumer products are driving the enterprise market. Companies like Facebook and Twitter (News - Alert) are very popular in the consumer space and help drive adoption within the enterprise.”

You can visit Dorey and his team from Noodle at the upcoming ITEXPO in booth number 522.

Many companies may also be wary of broad collaboration across the enterprise because of security concerns. The more documents are shared, they feel, the bigger the opportunity for them to wind up in front of the wrong eyes. Today’s cloud-based unified communications solutions often have robust enough security protocols in place, but the trick is to get workers to use them. Dorey says this is an area in which a responsible solutions provider can help.

“The weakest link in any security policy is the people,” said Dorey. “It is our responsibility to create software and services that help and encourage good security practice.”