As today's workforce continues to become more mobile and adopt the "on-the-go" mentality both at home and at work, their needs are also evolving. Companies need to respond. Empowering employees to work anytime, anywhere will improve efficiencies and increase productivity. When the staff takes their work outside of office walls, an environment of knowledge, sharing and creativity across local, regional and global teams is created naturally. The Internet of Everything (IoE) is a clear driver in this new collaborative environment as companies continue to connect more people, devices, processes and data.  This collaborative environment, in turn, also empowers a company as a whole through the insights and data exchanged.

In one of my previous posts, How Not Where Is What Matters Most in a Collaborative Work Environment, I noted that mobile and remote workers have higher performance ratings than traditional workers. Are these connections increasing the comfort level with utilizing remote resources on a consistent basis, such as remote mentoring or collaboration with global teams? Is it the extended connection to global colleagues and customers to obtain better insight and decisions? Or, is it the combination?

IoE plays a crucial role in connecting with these remote resources and collaboration technology. In order to manage these connections efficiently and to realize the potential value, Cisco utilizes our own technologies to collaborate and work seamlessly across multiple offices and platforms, including:

WebEx: During a typical day, I am on WebEx at least five times, collaborating with colleagues in a secure meeting place. We are able to use video conferencing, document sharing, annotation and whiteboards to connect. While conference lines are a great way to connect, bringing real-time sharing and collaboration over the web to our meetings has increased engagement and productivity.

Jabber: I use Jabber throughout my day to communicate with colleagues quickly via instant messages. If our conversation becomes more involved, we can quickly create a WebEx meeting to collaborate on a more in-depth level.

Telepresence: For meetings with executives and customers, we often use Telepresence to collaborate with lifelike videoconferencing. Using high-res video, we can hold conferences with parties around the globe as if we are in the same room.

These are just some of the technologies that I use daily to help me stay connected while I'm on the go. These connections through the Internet of Everything -people to people, people to data, technology to people, technology to data, and so on -anytime, anywhere efficiency is no longer just an idea, but a reality that is changing how workers collaborate and manage business processes.

How do you utilize IoE to collaborate? And how will the increasing amount of mobile workers affect the knowledge and data exchanged across the Internet of Everything? Next time you have the option to work from anywhere, anytime, let us know how you use IoE to be efficient.