By Carolyn Crews, Corporate Solutions Director, Cisco Internet Business Solutions Group
To meet global agricultural demand, John Deere devised a "design anywhere, build anywhere" strategy to let virtual research-and-development (R&D) and manufacturing teams collaborate throughout business units and locations. When IBM wanted its 320,000 worldwide employees to be able to locate internal expertise and information quickly, it embedded social-networking software in the company directory. To improve customer marketing, Jyske Bank in Holland installed interactive video screens in branches to educate visitors about new products.
Effective Collaboration
These stories span geography and vertical industries. They also share a common outcome called effective collaboration, which offers a new means of production for:
- Innovation
- Growth
- Success
Most good examples of workplace collaboration also share a three-step approach.
1. Collaboration must be initiated at the executive level.
Line-of-business leaders need to spark collaboration and embody it in everyday behaviors. Collaboration is much more than just putting technology on the desktop; it stems from how a leader articulates corporate objectives and the benefits of using technology to help achieve them.
Procter & Gamble chief executive officer A.G. Lafley told his company that it would alter its innovation process in order to gain competitive advantage. Instead of relying exclusively on internal R&D, Lafley invested in collecting knowledge and intellectual property from outside the company. His goal for 2008 was for half of new products and services to originate from ideas shared by outside entities such as:
- Academics
- Consumers
- Partners
- Suppliers
If company executives issue mandates like this one, business and technical teams will marshal the resources necessary to implement them.
2. Collaboration is much more than tools and technology.
From a technical perspective, the oft-quoted line from the film "Field of Dreams" ("If you build it, they will come.") does not apply to collaboration. A company might spend millions of dollars on infrastructure and product features, but the workforce will not necessarily use them. Collaboration is a different way of working together, of linking with colleagues, partners, and customers to produce a substantially different business outcome. Many corporations have a top-down structure divided into separate functional organizations. In a new collaborative environment, business is a borderless enterprise that requires a different type of leader and organizational structure: a globally adaptive executive who embraces openness and senses the subtleties and direct influences of different cultures.
For example, when measuring call-center success, we typically rely on metrics such as call-resolution times. Collaboration often involves shifting from an internal metric to gauging external experiences:
- Did the customer extend loyalty to the company for another five years?
- Will the customer buy more products and services because of a 15-minute conversation?
- What have we learned from that customer that we can use to satisfy other customers?
3. The business must lead the collaboration effort.
Collaboration begins by examining the outcome you are trying to deliver to your corporation. If the goal is to double customer-satisfaction scores by cutting product defects in half, you need to determine who will work together for that outcome. How will engineering need to interact with the supply chain? How will marketing need to communicate with sales? Only then can we determine the types of technologies and tools to support and guide that interaction.
Reach, Richness, Openness, and Speed
For technology deployment decisions, we recommend exploring four primary concerns. Ill use a simple consumer-product example:
- Reach: If our company aims to bring a new laundry detergent to market, whom do we need to contact before releasing the product? A new supplier? A new advertising agency? Customers focus groups?
- Richness: Do we need to share a basic document outlining the detergent formula? Do we need a three-dimensional view of a new package prototype?
- Openness: Is the formula secret? Can we share it with suppliers?
- Speed: How quickly does each interaction need to occur if we are to meet our projected release date?
The answers to these questions help us choose effective tools. For instance, an open web platform might enable customer feedback and discussion. Cisco TelePresence might offer a richer view of the package design. Video or RSS feeds might facilitate quick information transfer.
Collaborative Chief Information Officers
Chief information officers (CIOs) now have a great opportunity to lead the corporate discussion about how to achieve business imperatives through collaboration. An effective CIO should:
- Approach business leaders
- Learn their goals
- Translate the goals to a supporting infrastructure from both a tools and a cultural perspective
Collaboration among people in different locations and from different cultures is hard work. Although understanding utilization and technical capabilities is important, finessing the art of people working together is the added value that a highly effective CIO can bring.
