How Collaboration Will Drive the Next Step Change in Productivity

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Excerpt from How Collaboration Will Drive the Next Step Change in Productivity:

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An Extraordinary Wave of New Technologies

Today, we are at the brink of a new wave of technology entering the workplace. Collaborative technologies, most of which have appeared only within the last decade, greatly amplify our abilities to interact simultaneously with large numbers of people. As they make their way from use in our personal lives into the workplace, they offer the promise of significant improvements in generating, capturing, and sharing knowledge; finding helpful colleagues and information; tapping into new sources of innovation and expertise; and harnessing the “wisdom of crowds.” Collaborative technologies have the potential to shift the way we interact with people on our teams, find external expertise when it’s needed, and share ideas and observations more broadly.

But, as with the technology investments of the 1980’s and 1990’s, the ability of these technologies to drive real productivity growth will depend on whether or not they are accompanied by thoughtful changes in the way work is done. New approaches will need to be developed and tailored to sector- and company-specific business processes because the ways in which collaborative technologies contribute to productivity will vary by industry sector and organization.

It would be a mistake to assume that the most productive applications of collaboration in the business enterprise will emerge naturally as workers use whatever technology platform is provided. Just as the most successful and widely adopted platforms for our personal use, such as Facebook, 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.

Our research has identified ten specific roles that collaborative technology can play in business.

• Share ideas between previously unconnected groups or individuals,
• Co-create products, services, and experiences,
• Engage stakeholders more deeply – customers, communities, employees, and partners,
• Tap people, expertise or other resources only as needed, making your fixed cost base more flexible,
• Coordinate activities, allowing individuals more flexibility regarding when and where they work with greater visibility into the progress of the whole,
• Distribute work, cost, or risk among multiple parties,
• Sense emerging patterns to detect trends, opportunities or threats,
• Pool judgments to develop better insight than any individual alone could possess,
• Poll a large number of individuals quickly to gather input or determine group-wide preferences, and
• Allow multiple parties to discuss and issue or debate possibilities, before coalescing around an emerging consensus.

Each of these forms of collaboration will be critically important factors for future success in some industries and not important at all in others. Each requires a slightly different implementation design – for the technology itself, as well as for 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.

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