The Interactive Multimedia & Collaborative Communications Alliance (IMCCA), a non-profit industry association for unified communications and collaboration (UC&C), celebrating its 22nd anniversary this year, is hosting it’s 2021 Collaboration Thanksgiving Webcast on November 16. In it, panelists will discuss how the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has permanently changed the collaboration industry. Moreover, it altered the trajectory of the future of work and radically changed what formerly were best practices.
IMCCA’s The Future of Work – Collaboration’s New Best Practices webcast replaces the IMCCA’s in-person fall event. It will address the emerging reality that our current pandemic might never completely go away. If we face such a future, we should no longer wait for a return to a “normal” that, in reality, no longer exists.
Adapt Our Approach
The webcast will argue that the collaboration industry must stop looking at our reactions as temporary safety measures and, instead, begin to adapt our approach to interpersonal collaboration on a permanent basis. That is, we have to redefine what “normal” is, instead of waiting for that return to past habits. It will include panel discussions by industry experts. They’ll offer insights into how we define collaboration’s new best practices. It will focus on hybrid working and learning, enterprise-office design, home-office design and much more.
“The power and value of remote visual collaboration was tested and proven just weeks into the pandemic, and [it] has kept organizations in business during the crisis,” Carol Zelkin, Executive Director, IMCCA, stated. “It’s a time to acknowledge that this new chapter will likely be around for the foreseeable future. And [it will] begin to define the new rules and best practices for remote and hybrid working and learning. Our Future of Work – Collaboration’s New Best Practices webcast will bring the best and brightest voices in our industry together to help explain what everyone could and should be doing to prepare to excel in this reality.”
Industry Impact Awards
A highlight of the event will be a presentation of IMCCA Industry Impact Awards. UC&C organizations receive them to recognize their new products/platforms and/or services that acknowledge this vastly different future for collaboration. The honorees’ offerings move us closer to where we need to be. Nominees for the Industry Impact Awards will be selected by IMCCA Executive Board and Board Members. Then, a panel of five completely independent industry-expert judges will select three nominees from each of four categories. The results will be announced during the program. Categories include the following: Collaboration Platform New Features; Hardware And Peripherals That Support A New Model Of Working; Integrators And Service Providers That Have Developed Next-Generation Offerings; and Distributors And Miscellaneous Organizations That Have Helped Move Us To The Future Of Work.
The independent judges are Irwin Lazar of Metrigy Research; Roopam Jain of Frost & Sullivan; Tim Banting of Omdia; David Smith of InFlow Analysis; and Dan Ferrisi of Sound & Communications.
Click here to sign up to participate.
For more news from Sound & Communications, click here.