In this assignment, you will create a presentation for your organization to explain how successful collaboration can improve success and provide competitive advantages. Scenario: Your organization has

Mar. 20, 2020 PC Quest Athena Information Solutions Pvt. Ltd. Article 618 words 1270LFull Text: Byline: Soma TahWith geographical boundaries no longer a barrier for work, virtual meetings and remote collaboration are becoming the new norms.Hence, people want immersive and cognitive tools and technologies that allow them to get richer collaborative experiences even inthe virtual workspaces, says Pankaj Agrawal, Director Sales Collaboration Business, Cisco India & SAARC.Excerpt:Collaboration evolving for the modern workplacePeople don t need a large video conferencing room for collaboration today as they heavily depend on their mobile phones forday-to-day collaboration needs.Small rooms or open spaces with a video unit or the whiteboard are more popular with millennials, instead of large dedicated videoconferencing rooms. Organizations are creating huddle spaces to provide an experience that millennials will like.The Cisco Webex Room Kit offers an integrated unit can be paired with any display to bring more intelligence and usability to thesmall to medium team collaboration needs. There are compact and simpler units like Webex Board, which can be placedanywhere without too many wires running and they can be a great aid for video-conferencing, for content sharing on the whiteboardand relaying that information with people in real-time.If you look at the high-end units also, which we call Panorama also have evolved from room remediation to somethingwhich can be used as plug-and-play.Cognitive collaboration is the way forwardUsing artificial intelligence(AI) to drive much stronger engagement in meetings is the next wave for collaboration . Essentially, it isabout using cognitive tools and technologies to make remote collaboration as good as or even better than face-to-face collaboration .It involves using intelligent virtual assistants, facial recognition, natural language processing and conversational interfaces, noisedetection and suppression, for providing capabilities like people insights, contextual real-time assistance in meetings, and dynamicdocument sharing, and analytics-based routing, etc.For example, when ten people join from a large conference room, AI tools can be used to locate and zoom in on the person speaking,allowing the user to experience the feeling of close engagement that one experiences in a physical meeting. We use AI-basednoise detection and suppression mechanism that can detect background noises and alert specific participants with thesuggestion to mute . Audio from any active speaker with background noise also gets muffled for other meeting participants.Another challenge people often face during the follow-up meetings are: What did I discuss last time? and What will Ifollow up in this meeting? To help resolve this challenge, we have an AI-based assistant, EVA (Enterprise VoiceAssistant) who becomes part of the meeting, takes notes during the meeting and also does transcriptions.Removing language barriers in collaboration We realize that when people across the globe work together, some of them might be comfortable speaking in their local languages.Although this can become a communication barrier for an actual face-to-face meeting, we, in this particular case can make remotecollaboration even better than a real face-to-face meeting by providing a real-time translation feature. This feature is now available ina few languages, and we are working towards extending it to other languages.Raising risk awareness on non-secure collaborationA lot of organizations use non-secure collaboration technologies, without realizing how they are exposing themselves to differenttypes of risks. They might not understand the need to switch to secure collaboration tools and platforms until they face an adverseincident. For instance, someone might attempt to hack crucial and sensitive data from the meeting. Therefore, besides securing thecollaboration platform, it is also vital to safeguard the content and tools that run on the platform. Webex uses end-to-end encryption toprevent any unauthorized access to the meeting and collaboration data.Copyright 2020 Cyber Media (India) Ltd., distributed by Contify.com COPYRIGHT 2020 Athena Information Solutions Pvt. Ltd. http://app.contify.com/content/p/pcquest/ (MLA 8th Edition) "Cognitive collaboration taking over physical and virtual meetings." , 20 Mar. 2020, p. NA. , https://link-gale-com.libraryresources.columbiasouthern.edu/apps/doc/A622165050/PPIS?u=oran95108&sid=PPIS&xid=7055bbfb. Accessed 13July 2020. GALE|A622165050