Mariano O'Kon

Businesses are increasingly under pressure to find new ways to increase productivity and stay ahead of the competition.

Collaboration technologies are the next phase of the Internet that will increase productivity, innovation,and growth.

New networking technologies are offering organizations far greater freedom as to when, where, and how they collaborate. Is your company ready to take advantage of these major communications innovations?

Investments in information technology help organizations change the way they can do business. But technology cannot change old habits. Leadership coupled with strategic management is the most effective way to create the organizational changes necessary to take best advantage of advances in technology.

Why Is Collaboration So Important?

Collaboration is the act of people working together to reach a common goal. It involves getting the right information to the right people at the right time to make the right decision. Such well-informed and speedy decisions in turn help organizations get work done.

But collaboration is much more than communication. It is the way that all the people in an enterprise function together. Better collaboration means better business operations

By improving these capabilities with improved collaboration, organizations can increase the scale and capacity of their processes and develop new ways of doing business.

Good collaborative information sharing and decision making lead to better business results by reducing manufacturing costs, stimulating innovation, speeding time-to-market, improving product and service quality, and opening new business opportunities.

Certainly, collaboration has always been fundamental to business. After all, humans are highly social animals, and by interacting with each other, we gain important information.

But new pressures on businesses are making collaboration more important than ever.

In addition to economic conditions that are requiring even more cost-efficient operations, several long-term trends, including information overload, globalization, and partnering (through increased outsourcing and virtual companies), have put collaboration in the spotlight.

In all these cases, various barriers (organizational, physical, and psychological) inhibit the optimum exchange of information to make decisions and get work done.

To gain the most benefit from investments in collaborative tools, organizational leaders must make cultural, management, and process changes a priority. Without such behavioral and procedural initiatives, new collaborative technologies will offer only limited benefits, but if carried out well, implementation of these new technologies has the potential to transform an organization and bring exceptional new operational efficiencies and business opportunities

Components of Collaboration

To efficiently and effectively move through the investigative, performance, and transformation phases of collaboration, organizations must carefully cultivate the three components of collaboration: people, processes, and technology.

People

Also described as the cultural aspect of collaboration, these component focuses on ways to influence people’s attitudes and collaborative behaviors: what people believe, how they feel about something, and what they think is proper behavior. Main areas of focus include leadership expectations, management practices, performance measurements, incentives and rewards, role models, and hiring policies.

New behavioral expectations need to be clearly defined, developed, and incorporated into an organization’s culture. Leadership and management systems need to align with new collaboration efforts for the proper behavior expectations to be set, operationalized, and measured (that is, made accountable).

Processes

Process changes are changes in the way you get your work done. Processes include governance, decision making, skills cultivation, funding, and operational logistics, with a strong emphasis on review-and-improve cycles.

Collaborative processes are the institutional support structures necessary for helping people implement collaboration. The unit of performance shifts from individual to group or team in a collaborative setting. An organization that uses collaboration well needs to understand that the traditional systems of performance will not work effectively (that is, individual systems produce competition, whereas team systems produce collaboration).

Management models need to change to reward and recognize the right behaviors.

Technology

There are many types of collaborative applications—and there will be many more:  Wikis, blogs, virtual workspaces, video presentations, instant messaging, social networking sites, web conferencing, and Twitter are just a start.

With this in mind, chief information officers (CIOs) need to build a foundation to support those applications.

The range of collaborative possibilities will be limited by the network’s infrastructure. A collaborative network infrastructure should be able to carry a host of multimedia services with quality-of-service (QoS) capabilities, especially for video and audio traffic.

Collaboration is the platform for Business, only by focusing on all three components, People, Process and Technology, will organizations be able to gain the most benefit from their investments

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If you liked, or disliked, this post, please comment on it. This is the first of a series of posts focused on Collaboration

Disclaimer: I work for Cisco on Collaboration technologies supporting Emerging Markets. This post is based on publicly available material that can be found in Cisco’s web site: http://cisco.com/go/collaboration