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Butler on: Collaboration
You know it's a good thing - a good thing you're probably not doing well enough

By Butler Group

Published: Friday 22 August 2003

Collaboration isn't just a buzzword but a very real part of what makes good businesses great. Leading industry analyst Martin Butler here looks at what it means, how we achieve it and the benefits it can bring...

There is a paradox in the concept of collaboration. We instinctively think we would always wish to collaborate with others to do a better job, and they with us. It is a natural process and, given tools to help them, surely people will communicate and collaborate freely. In reality, however, we only tend to do the things we are told to do or those that make our working lives easier.

The reason is that we are all driven by the basic premise of 'what's in it for me?' Organisations must be cognisant of this when implementing collaborative technologies such as enterprise portals, shared workspaces or messaging systems. If the technology does not help the user, or it is not a seamless part of their operational processes, it will not deliver the expected returns.

There is normally too much conflict, political jostling and self-interest for a model of self-adoption of collaborative solutions to gain and sustain traction within the organisation. Where possible, collaboration should be built into the organisation, through its business processes and applications, in order to ensure active participation. To overcome the paradox requires the alignment of people, the business requirements and the technology.

Collaboration is an activity – it is not a piece of technology. The culture of an organisation needs to be supportive of collaboration, in terms of identifying where, why and how collaboration can yield business benefits. Most businesses have yet to get to the bottom of this challenge and need to address fundamental issues such as organisational structure, job descriptions, and employee performance, in order to create an environment that actively encourages collaboration. Technology can support or facilitate different styles of collaboration, each of which is focused on helping to solve a particular business problem. But cannot make it happen.

Collaboration should help businesses meet a number of pressing requirements and competitive pressures. Around 35 per cent of overall costs in the average company are made up of sales, general and administrative costs. Enterprise applications, such as customer relationship management (CRM), are designed to address the data and information handling complexity that exists in key operational activities. However, the roles of most employees extend beyond neat operational silos and require that data and information be extracted, modified, distributed and generally re-purposed. Whenever this occurs there is an associated cost relating to the handling of information.

With a well-constructed roadmap and clear return on investment (ROI) case, collaborative solutions can start from very small projects or small infrastructure changes. For example, a project team may be given their own workspace or instant messaging (IM) technology may be integrated with email across the organisation. It is not necessary for these solutions to be expensive or to expose the business to undue risk. It is our view that collaboration solutions need to be focused on delivering a rapid ROI. However, they should be deployed with an awareness of the future strategy and be open to new and unexpected benefits that can arise from increased productivity and efficiency of information handling.

This means that a framework is needed for deployment of collaborative solutions. The long-term, and in many instances unpredicted, benefits and savings from such solutions will be many times greater than short-term ROI projects, which act initially as a trigger to set the business off in the right direction.

Just as much of the value of an organisation's data is held in unstructured data, so unstructured collaboration is often of the greatest value. Structured collaboration, such as workflow, requires that knowledge is hard coded as rules. This is great in terms of improving automation, and the routing of information. However, rules constrain and do not allow for innovation.

On the other hand, ad hoc, unstructured collaboration can dramatically improve personal productivity, reducing the time spent searching for information or chasing answers. Nevertheless, it needs to be encouraged at the right place and the right time and with the right tools to capture the results of such exchanges.

There are other factors beyond the directly financial that are driving the need for collaborative solutions. We are living in an increasingly regulated business world and the risk of legal exposure from failure to comply with regulations is a compelling force that can put an organisation's survival at risk. Smarter businesses should look to offset the cost of compliance with the benefits that more effective collaboration can yield.

Similarly, collaboration solutions can help in carrying out change management programmes, and in integrating people working in international and global enterprises.

In short, collaboration can help the enterprise unlock the vast reserves of knowledge capital held in the collective wisdom, experience, and knowledge of its employees.

Martin Butler is the founder of Butler Group, which is running an event focused on collaboration 17-18 September. For more information go to http://www.butlergroup.com/events/cpl/ or for information on other Butler Group research see this page.