The Three Phases of Organizational Collaboration

November 30, 2009

By Charles Waltner

Every company and every organization within a company will go through each evolutionary phase of collaboration: investigative, performance and transformational.

The pace at which an organization moves through these phases will depend on business priorities and collaboration readiness. The key is to develop the right components (people, processes, technology) at the right time to maintain momentum. Subsequent efforts build on the progress made in the previous phase. As organizations travel along this evolutionary path, benefits from collaboration grow.

Here's a quick overview to help identify each phase of organizational collaboration and plan accordingly:

The Investigative Phase

The investigative phase is about learning and preparing. Many organizations are likely already in the investigative phase. This phase is marked by spontaneous, ad hoc use of various Web 2.0 tools to help individual productivity. The use of these tools spreads virally (person-to-person through word-of-mouth recommendations).

You will know you are in the investigative phase when you start hearing statements like: "I need a wiki/blog" or "I want to be able to host a video conference/Web meeting."  This is the single tool/single task mindset where collaboration is viewed as an event or activity that benefits a few individuals or a small group.

Tools used in the investigative phase typically run autonomously, with little, if any, integration into an organization's information technology systems. As companies become more deliberate in how employees adopt Web 2.0, such tools and associated activities should be "sandboxed" to protect the network and test their effectiveness in controlled usage scenarios.

While an organization can glean some benefits from these islands of collaboration, many collaborative tools increase in value with increased usage. Social networks for information exchange follow Metcalf's Law for computer networks, which states the value of a network increases proportionately to the square of the number of its connected users.

Though ultimately limited in its impact, the investigative phase provides crucial groundwork for wider deployment efforts. It generates best practices and examples of success that the company can use to teach and inspire. From the investigative phase, coaches and mentors grow from the community of experts. It is important to cultivate enthusiasm, creativity, and inclusion that naturally germinate in this phase. This provides a crucial foundation to future collaborative efforts.

The Performance Phase

While the investigative phase is a natural and necessary introduction to Web 2.0 tools and enterprise collaboration as a means to improve operations, organizations must "cross the chasm" and transition into the performance phase in order to reap organization-wide benefits.

Adoption of collaborative tools and techniques plateaus without broader support and well-defined benefits. In particular, an enterprise must formalize its strategy for how collaboration technologies can change its business. The investigative phase should offer plenty of ideas about what this might be. But the key in the performance phase is that any collaboration efforts must be prioritized based on the long-term vision for the company and the strategy for getting there.

The performance phase is where organizations turn their focus toward driving company and process performance. It is here that efforts shift from a strictly organic and opportunistic approach to a more structured and prescriptive approach to developing collaboration. In this stage a company looks to its internal business models, organizational models and support systems to provide the leverage points for improving organizational performance.

In the performance phase, organizations need to move from a focus on the technology aspects of collaboration to the people and process aspects of collaboration. The performance phase takes those lessons learned by individuals and small groups in the investigative phase and applies them to the needs of the entire business.

Unlike in the investigative phase, organizations in the performance phase must apply all the framework components of people, processes and technology to ensure proper and thorough adoption of new collaboration capabilities within targeted constituencies. For example, developing ways to measure the collective performance of groups rather than just output from individuals, is an important task in the performance phase.

The Transformational Phase

The transformational phase is about using collaboration to reinvent your organization. In this phase, the new collaborative capabilities of your organization have become so profound that your organization is now able to do things that were previously impossible.

To gain the most value from the transformational phase you need to move your focus squarely to removing any functional, political and process barriers that may remain to business collaboration. In the transformational phase, organizations deeply embed operational components of their collaboration framework into the core of their business. Management must view Web 2.0 collaboration as part of an organization's intrinsic character.

With Web 2.0 collaboration as a foundation, an organization is ready to embrace concepts such as global, 24-hour workflows and virtual teams. By being able to easily include employees, partners and customers in collaborative systems, organizations can successfully embrace the ideal of the boundaryless enterprise, crowd-sourcing or some yet-discovered business model.

Charles Waltner is a freelance writer in Piedmont, Calif.