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Features

The Case for Collaboration (Part I of this series)

Cultivating Organizational Collaboration (Part II of this series)

The Journey to Greater Organizational Collaboration (Part III of this series)

Cisco Creates a New Generation of Collaborative Leaders (Part IV of this series)

The Three Phases of Organizational Collaboration

Nov. 16, 2009

by Charles Waltner

Perhaps the most important advice is this: Just get started. The Cisco Collaboration Framework provides the guidelines for designing your development roadmap. And that journey starts with a few simple steps.

Step One: Begin by investigating the various collaboration tools available.

Organizations should begin by investigating the various collaboration tools available. It is a highly scattered market, with dozens of different vendors in many possible categories. Tools can be combined or integrated in a variety of ways. Start trying a few to get a sense of how they might help your organization.

As an organization moves through the Investigative phase, it should consider all of these IT components:

• Web 2.0/collaboration tools
• Productivity and business applications
• Infrastructure: servers, desktops and other user devices
• Network and bandwidth
• Existing internal IT systems

Step Two: Draft a collaboration vision statement.

As you become familiar with new collaborative technologies and their capabilities, begin drafting a collaboration vision statement. Start simply by reflecting on how improved collaboration could help your organization. Ask these questions:

• What is the company's vision and strategic priorities?
• What are the key trends in the industry and how do they affect the business?
• Which parts of the business are information-, expertise- and interaction- intensive?
• Which collaboration factors need improvement in light of the company's vision and strategic priorities?
• What would be the benefit of greater collaboration for the company?
• What business trends might make collaboration even more important?
• Where is information and expertise most needed to improve your operations?

Your business posture will influence your collaboration vision, strategy and execution:

Survival business posture: "We need to shrink to grow, and collaboration will allow us to reduce costs across the board."

Transition business posture: "We will selectively use collaboration to extract greater performance of our current business processes, especially for R&D and sales."

Attacking business posture: "Now is the time to differentiate ourselves and get ahead of the pack. We will use collaboration to create new ways to interact with our customers/partners/each other that will set us miles apart from our competitors."

Step Three: Run a series of workshops.

Next, organizations should run a series of workshops to identify the details of how collaboration can help them reach their business vision. Workshops can focus on initiatives in specific product groups, process chains or cross-functional interactions.

From these workshops, organizations should identify their most important collaboration impact zones. This will guide the strategy and tactics for rolling out new collaboration capabilities.

Prepare for the workshops by assessing business priorities, primary business processes that relate to those priorities, and examples of how employees, experts and information interact to facilitate these processes. At the workshops, key participants in these processes discuss pain points and ways collaboration might improve their processes.

Workshop participants should look at collaboration in terms of how much reach, richness and openness can be influenced. These workshop assessments should lead to a prioritized list of collaboration impact zones.

Step Four: Benchmark key metrics.

Once you have a couple of strategic collaboration efforts sketched out, benchmark the key metrics. These are the starting points that will provide the necessary references for assessing progress. Metrics will tell managers if and how much new collaboration capabilities are improving product development times, increasing customer satisfaction or reducing manufacturing errors.

Organizations also should establish a matrix of metrics following adoption and usage of collaboration tools. Are people actually reading the blogs or listening to podcasts? Are the expert videos being downloaded? Are people getting access to better information? If not, why not?

Be sure to benchmark both current perceptions about value or collaboration as well as readiness. Formal and informal surveys of both business leaders and rank-and-file employees will help set up baselines. Such established benchmarks are invaluable, given the multi-phase, long-term development required for meaningful collaboration improvements. Without such references, a company will have difficulty assessing long-term progress.

Step Five: Start building collaboration capabilities.

Once benchmarks are established, it's time for an organization to roll up its collective sleeves and start building collaboration capabilities in each dimension of people, processes and technology. The focus here is to gain some early wins to demonstrate how improved collaboration can help your business. This will build adoption momentum and provide how-to examples to guide subsequent efforts.

The key focus will be on improving the reach, richness, openness and speed of Collaboration Impact Zones identified through workshops. These factors define the scope of collaboration for a given activity and where an organization might need to make improvement:

Reach: The capability to identify, access and employ internal and external resources at the right time to influence better business results.

Richness: The ability to effectively and efficiently foster the development and communication of new ideas, concepts and strategies to make decisions and take actions.

Openness: An environment that enables individuals, teams and organizations to have visibility into and the ability to easily contribute to the results of a work effort.

Speed: How new collaboration processes can increase the speed at which organizations can get things done and respond to changes.

Sixth Step: Establish test-and-learn processes.

Finally, establish test-and-learn processes. We are only at the beginning of the evolution of collaboration. Everyone is still figuring out what to do. And the technologies promise to rapidly evolve during the next few years. Who knows what the hot thing will be next year? Whatever their goals, organizations must keep in mind that the new era of collaboration is still a work in progress.

Organizations should aim to obtain, memorialize and publicize "early wins" using new collaboration methods. An early win is:

Visible: A large number of people can participate in the new collaborative process or can see its results.

Unambiguous: There is no argument about the success of the new collaborative process.

Transformational: The new collaborative process should directly support the vision for the company.

Early wins offer several benefits:

• They provide evidence of the benefits of collaborative change
• They help an organization fine-tune its collaborative vision
• They build collaboration knowledge and skills
• They build the momentum of interest and support for new collaboration efforts

Ultimately, every organization needs to constantly assess how new Web 2.0 tools are helping or could possibly help them achieve their goals. The ones that figure this out fastest will have a lot to gain.

Charles Waltner is a freelance writer in Piedmont, Calif.