Post by Sean Lew, Business Consultant at BearingPoint
There is a growing need for organizations to collaborate more efficiently across time zones, geographic locations and across departments. Collaboration promises greater efficiency, streamlined communication and better knowledge retention across an organization. Collaboration software like wikis has also been sprouting all over organizations with no real direction from the senior management. Many organizations have started taking a more serious look at such forms of collaboration technologies.
Internal collaboration
Collaboration is not just providing a virtual platform for employees to work together. It allows employees to hold conversations and discussions online and provides background and context for visitors or new team members. With all the information well documented, there is a reduced risk of losing information when employees move on.
Many collaboration technologies also provide a social aspect of it where employees can connect with people outside of their team. This allows self discovery of assets within the organization, find other experts and innovate on the project, department or the business.
External collaboration
Collaboration with suppliers and customers should also be an area organizations should look at. Harvard Business School (http://hbswk.hbs.edu/archive/5258.html) conducted a research on Procter and Gamble’s (P&G) innovation model which includes connecting with the global talent pool in search of promising ideas and implement P&G’s capabilities to create better and cheaper products – fast. Such forms of collaboration, may it be with suppliers or customers can be very astonishing.
The success of collaboration is to take an enterprise view and formulate an adoption strategy across the various departments. What is your organization doing to strategize and implement changes to meet the needs of your rising collaboration requirements?
Author: Sean Lew
New Thinking 