Gartner defines the collaborative work management market as products that provide task-driven workspaces to enable end users to plan, coordinate and automate their work. These solutions provide user-friendly capabilities for work planning, in-context collaboration, content creation, workflow and automation, reporting, analytics and dashboards, as well as use-case accelerators on a platform that handles data management and administrative operations. Products in this market are defined by their purpose (work planning and execution), their target users and their broad functionality.
The ECA market consists of vendors offering a discrete application, well-defined module, or cohesive set of capabilities that enables people in “communicator” roles to plan, create, coordinate, and distribute internal communications across the workforce or to specific audiences. ECAs include analytics that measure interactions and effectiveness of communications across content, channels, devices, campaigns and feedback loops to assess business and employee value.
WFM is a solution comprising software, services and (often) hardware that helps organizations manage the operational deployment of their workers. In most cases, WFM is deployed for hourly paid/blue-collar employees. The deployment of WFM for both hourly and salaried workers can be justified primarily in the following cases: The organization wants both salaried and hourly workers to use the same absence management and/or access control system. To capture the overtime of salaried workers and use that data to calculate gross pay. When salaried workers are scheduled to work dynamic shifts, rather than set “office” hours. When salaried workers must allocate and track their time to projects or tasks and a WFM system is already in use.