The need for employees to be more productive in the current market has pushed many organisations to increase their investment in collaboration tools, a hiring expert says.
"We are seeing a lot of restructuring and 'de-layering' in the market so organisations are really requiring their employees to be more productive," Hudson ICT national practice director Martin Retschko said.
"To be more productive, you need the flexibility and the tools and you need access to information faster and more efficiently."
He said the use of collaboration tools would be an ongoing trend in the market.
The Hudson ICT Leaders Series Report – Cloud, BYOD & Teleworking: Mastering the Skills Mix for Today’s IT Function, released late last year, found many chief information officers were turning to 'new world' technologies to find more flexible and cost-effective ways to help drive innovation and productivity.
"Some organisations are in the very early stages and some are quite sophisticated in the way that they go about providing the tools and the policies to support that," Mr Retschko said.
"The candidates are also starting to look, in many cases, very deeply at these policies."
He said organisations that worked in a project-based environment, including some of the creative industries, had embraced the tools as well as those with large mobile workforces.
"CIOs are grasping that opportunity in the main to look at how they can drive performance of the organisation and look at technology as an enabler and are partnering with human resources to look at how they make their workforce more productive, how they can ensure that their people have the very best tools to be able to reach their customers and compete effectively in an ever-increasing level of competition globally."
He said organisations were also looking for better ways to reach consumers, particularly in retail and pharmaceutical industries.
"There is a whole range of consumer-driven sectors that will invest in technology and digital solutions to reach their customers more effectively," Mr Retschko said.
Ambition's technology division managing director Andrew Cross said there would be a bigger focus on tele-presence, video-conferencing and collaboration tools this year.
"If you go back 12 or 18 months people were talking about collaboration tools, Yammer and the likes, but they were not widely adopted across businesses," he said. "A number have now shown very successfully that they work and they are now ingrained into their business psyche and general way of doing work."
