Four Keys to Successful Enterprise Collaboration
by Tamara Erickson
Most enterprise leaders are sold on on the tremendous potential new collaborative technologies present to change the way work gets done: increasing productivity, stimulating innovation, and enhancing employee engagement. But realizing the benefits is proving to be a frustrating challenge for many: How do you achieve widespread adoption? Why is it so difficult to drive real changes in the way work is done? How can you speed the adoption of productive practices in the workforce? Our new research provides answers and guidelines.
To download your free copy of Four Keys to Successful Enterprise Collaboration, complete the form at right. Or, take a look at the excerpt below to sample the research included in this white paper.
Excerpt from Four Keys to Successful Enterprise Collaboration:
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Keys to Social Media Adoption
There are four keys to the successful, productive adoption of collaborative technology:
- Strategy – start with a clear, specific intent in mind
- Technology – invest in technology designed around user behavior
- Organization – create new structures and practices that support collaboration
- Personal Engagement – catalyze individual discretionary effort
Strategy
Where can collaborative technology have the biggest impact on your business? What specifically do you want to achieve? Consider who has knowledge that is not being fully leveraged, where you could speed your processes through faster exchange of information, or who would benefit from being connected to whom.
Successful personal sites have clear and focused objectives. For example, Amazon.com wants to sell lots of books and other goods. Their design is cleverly geared to encourage users to buy more and more products. Facebook wants to create a large, engaged community. The popular photo-sharing application is one way that they’ve deepened individuals’ connections within the network. Twitter wants to provide access to the pulse of breaking events and ideas. A specialty site, Stack Overflow, wants to help programmers pool their knowledge.
Rarely in corporations do we find that same degree of clarity of intent – and the accompanying discipline to focus and optimize around the selected intent. But getting clear about what you want to achieve is the first step toward success.
Teva produces and sells generic pharmaceuticals. Success requires being able to shift production rapidly to meet sudden peaks in demand, insuring a dependable supply to key customers. This company has employed a collaborative site for near-term problem resolution among employees in Manufacturing and Supply Chain Management. Using real-time collaboration, employees are able to share sudden changes in demand, solve unexpected problems in manufacturing, and get fast answers to questions that require the specialized expertise of a colleague. In our Collaborative Intents language (see sidebar), they are using the site to tap expertise and resources and to coordinate time and place.
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