Building Organizations to Leverage Collaborative Technologies
By Tammy Erickson
Over time, human beings have continually evolved new ways to communicate -- from the spoken word, to the written word, to the printed word, and onward. Each expansion in our communication capability has increased the scope and richness of our interactions. Each has been accompanied by changes in the ways we live and work. Today we are on the brink of another transformation. New technologies, most of which have appeared only within the last decade, greatly amplify our abilities to interact simultaneously with large numbers of people. The frontier of human productive capacity today is the power of extended collaboration – the ability to work together beyond the scope of small groups. There are eight assumptions that are deeply embedded in the ways most organizations operate and the ways most of us think about collaboration. With the new technologies of extended collaboration, these assumptions are no longer valid. This white paper examines each one and the implications for changes necessary for success.
To download your free copy of Building Organizations to Leverage Collaborative Technologies, complete the form at right. Or, take a look at the excerpt below to sample the research included in this white paper.
Excerpt from Building Organizations to Leverage Collaborative Technologies:
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Outdated Assumption #7: The purpose of collaboration is clear.
Perhaps one of the most limiting assumptions is simply the notion that we understand the applications of collaboration in the business enterprise, or that they will emerge naturally as workers use whatever technology platform is provided. This assumption ignores the reality that the applications which have been most successful in our personal lives, such as Facebook, are backed by teams of designers who focus on the processes and practices that make up our daily activities, creating features that are carefully matched to facilitate or reengineer a specific activity. The most successful and widely adopted platforms are thoughtfully geared to making our day-to-day activities more productive.
This same level of attention to the design of business collaboration will be essential to achieving breakthroughs in productivity, rather than simply increasing the social capital within the workplace. Just as research on the returns generated by investments in enterprise software in the 1980’s and 1990’s has shown that contributions to productivity growth only occurred when the technology was accompanied by thoughtful business process innovation, the same will certainly be true for collaborative technologies in the workplace. The ways in which collaborative technologies contribute to productivity will vary by industry sector and organization. The approaches will need to be tailored to sector- and company-specific business processes.
Without doubt, the use of today’s collaborative technology can bring a wide range of business benefits. For example, it makes it possible to:
• Tap people, expertise or other resources only as needed, making your fixed cost base more flexible.
• Share ideas between previously unconnected groups or individuals.
• Coordinate activities, allowing individuals more flexibility regarding when and where they work with greater visibility into the progress of the whole.
• Poll a large number of individuals quickly to gather input or determine group-wide preferences.
• Allow multiple parties to discuss and issue or debate possibilities, before coalescing around an emerging consensus.
Our research has identified 10 specific roles that collaborative technology can play in business. (See list, next page.) Some will be critically important factors for future success in some industries and not at all important in others. Each application requires a slightly different implementation design – for the technology itself, as well as for the adoption and use strategies. Understanding exactly which forms of collaboration will have the greatest impact on your business and how to re-think existing practices to leverage these new capabilities, is critically important to realizing the returns they promise.
The promise is there: historically, the most important determinants of longer-term productivity growth have been the rate of adoption of existing and new technologies and the concurrent changes in the way work is done. Today a new suite of technologies offers the opportunity for a step change forward – but only if we don’t assume it will happen automatically.
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