Today, the pace of business is so rapid that few can predict its twists and turns. Change is sometimes so rapid that even long-standing relationships may falter. Yesterday’s valued supplier may become tomorrow’s competitor. Or, large customers may suddenly disappear, victims of rapid technology shift or offshore transfers. A dependable software supplier may suddenly be a merger casualty, making already-installed software a casualty of obsolescence.

Companies must seek ways to drive additional revenues and profits from existing, relationships through increased collaboration – sharing of information, joint planning and projections. The Harvard Business Review reports that a 5% increase in customer retention can result in a 25% to 95% increase in profits from collaborative relationships.

Collaboration is the best way to interact

• Conversational: An exchange of information where the primary purpose of the interaction is discovery or relationship building. There is no central entity around which the interaction revolves but is a free exchange of information with no defined constraints.
• Transactional: Involves the exchange of transactions (for example, purchase orders) which alter the relationship. Interactions are most effectively handled by systems that record, manage and complete the transaction.
• Collaborative: Completely alters the effectiveness of the interaction between collaborators. Examples include the development of an idea, creation of a design, and achievement of a shared goal. Real collaboration technologies deliver the functionality for many participants to augment a common goal.

Collaboration Models

• Library: Reciprocal access to common content or data used in asynchronous or real-time collaboration
• Solicitation: Requests from a small set of requestors and multiple responses from respondents.
• Team: Few members who share common objectives and have a shared stake in their success, are interdependent, allowed to both read and write content, with a high level of interactivity.
• Community: Facilitate the activities of a community, with many members who have common interest and goals, seek to share information. Large communities are often moderated, facilitated or edited and all members are encouraged to both read and write content. Most members find value in just reading.
• Process Support: Use of collaboration technologies in a process or workflow. Frequently performed or critical processes, that require collaboration include: new product development, sales/marketing, customer service and support, training, supply chain management.

To ensure that a company stays competitive and operates at optimum production levels, it is imperative that efficient collaboration between all business lines and processes exists and grows. The goal is to make knowledge workers more efficient. In addition to managing a role that is specific to a knowledge area or worker, it is necessary to manage all the information that is trapped within the total process, internally within the organization, and even externally with customers and suppliers.

Collaborative Groupware

Tools that manage business processes and manage information applications, including workflow and project management already exist as stand-alone entities, but their value cannot be realized at the levels they originally promised. Workflow management is usually not integrated with project management and vice versa. To intelligently source out the information that is trapped within an enterprise and then integrate it with existing applications we need something more than stand-alone tools. Collaboration is achieved when applications integrate with processes, projects and information in real-time across the virtual enterprise.

Many companies are already working to collaborate internally, within the organization, through groupware. What is being suggested here is that Groupware could and should be used to enhance collaboration with external partners – customers and suppliers.

Management of Collaboration

As competitive pressures continually force companies to find ways to do more with less, few managers have the luxury of relying on their own dedicated staffs to accomplish their objectives. Instead, most must work with and through people across the organization, many of whom have different priorities, incentives, and ways of doing things.

Getting collaboration right promises tremendous benefits: a unified face to customers, faster internal decision making, reduced costs through shared resources, and the development of more innovative products. But despite the time, money and effort spent on initiatives to improve collaboration, few companies are happy with the results. Time and again management teams employ the same few strategies to boost internal cooperation. They restructure their organizations and reengineer their business processes. They create cross-unit incentives. They offer teamwork training. While such initiatives yield the occasional success story, most of them have only limited impact in dismantling organizational silos and fostering collaboration—and many are total failures. It’s important to understand why.

The Myths of Collaboration

Executives underestimate not only the inevitability of conflict but also its importance to the organization. The disagreements sparked by differences in perspective, competencies, access to information, and strategic focus within a company actually generate much of the value that can come from collaboration across organizational boundaries. Instead of trying simply to reduce disagreements, senior executives need to embrace conflict and manage the mechanisms for managing it.

The Stakeholder Strategy

The Stakeholder Strategy shows business leaders and managers how to establish and maintain positive, mutually beneficial stakeholder relationships. Based on a synthesis of ideas from community relations, marketing, stakeholder management, organizational change, sustainability, and corporate social responsibility literature – and featuring case study examples from companies around the world who are working to build collaborative relationships with their stakeholders – it offers an integrated framework, as well as the practical tools for developing new kinds of collaborative relationships.

Effective Collaboration

An effective enterprise collaboration solution must provide the technical systems links for people to work together in distributed, cross-organizational teams. Effective communications must be enabled across distance, time zones, and company borders, encouraging team members to discuss, analyze and review information collaboratively.

This kind of collaboration expands the conventional borders of the company. People can utilize the work experience of others in the extended enterprise and learn organizational practices and methods from peers in collaborating companies. Team members should be available from anywhere, at any time through a browser. As a result, the team and the companies will grow smarter and add more value every day as they refine and reuse their knowledge.

As companies work together, they generate mountains of unstructured information that is tough to synthesize in one company and seemingly impossible to rationalize between multiple companies. But new enterprise collaboration technology makes this possible. Desktop and intranet search and data mining solutions now allow companies to utilize more and more of the knowledge that most enterprise systems simply leave untapped in information archives.

Collaboration is the key

Industry experts and businesses that have implemented collaborative techniques claim that collaboration is a key enabler, allowing companies to react more quickly to changes in supply and demand. In the next few years your enterprise will be collaborative, or it won’t exist at all.

Related links:

Models of Collaboration

Creating a Collaboration Strategy

Process automation and collaboration

The Stakeholder Strategy: Profiting from Collaborative Business Relationships