Executive Thought Leadership

How to Harness the Power of Cutting-Edge Collaboration

Even the most advanced communication technologies won’t help enterprises whose cultures don’t prize collaboration. You need to take the human element into account to see business benefits with partners, suppliers, and customers.

By Howard Baldwin

Those who thought the technology downturn was going to dampen innovation are scratching their heads at the advancements in online collaboration. Consider what’s become available – and in some cases, commonplace – in the last few years:

• Unified communications’ integrated in-box for email, faxes, and voice mail
• Wikis, which global companies use as internal historical documents
• Blogs, which allow communication among different divisions on confidential projects
• Social networking sites that are used not only for company directories but also for finding employees who have specific skills
• Mashups, where users create applications that deliver greater insight than the individual components do on their own

“It’s not that people don’t want to collaborate,” says Robert Fort, CIO of Virgin Entertainment Group, a division of Richard Branson’s empire based in Los Angeles. “But if there’s a barrier, they stop.” Fort is testing unified communications to break down that barrier. “Instant messaging and one-click calling are little things that make it incredibly easy to contact someone and share what you’re thinking.”

What Fort describes is really the melding of the two key elements of collaboration: people and technology. For enterprises to have cutting-edge collaboration, according to CIOs who are immersed in such efforts, they must accommodate both. Though that’s a challenge, the ensuing results in terms of improving productivity – and indeed, even in changing business models – are worth the effort.

The People Problem

“Collaboration makes sure people are sharing knowledge with each other, and that there are no disenfranchised groups or disconnects,” says Michael Beddows, president of Catalyst Dynamics, a Montreal-based consulting firm focusing on collaboration. Today’s global economy makes collaboration an imperative, because “having contextual knowledge available at the right time and in the right place improves productivity, quality of service, and time to market.”

But CIOs maintain that collaboration needs to go a step further, into the realm of partnership; frequently, the phrase “trust network” emerges. “You not only have to make sure people are on the same page, but that they trust each other,” maintains Mitch Davis, CIO of Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. “Collaboration fails when personal interests override institutional needs.”

In fact, without the interpersonal connections, the technological capabilities may even become a drawback, warns Umesh Ramakrishnan, vice chairman of the executive search firm Christian & Timbers. If employees have good relationships with colleagues, they don’t hesitate to use the technology to contact them, even across time zone and cultural divides. “If you don’t have that relationship, you may try to figure the answer yourself. That translates to blown relationships and blown deadlines.”

Thus, technological collaboration only thrives within a culture of people who support it. At the same time, inculcating collaboration into the culture also requires measuring participation in knowledge-sharing. At Atlanta-based Boys & Girls Clubs of America (B&GC), CIO Bill Regehr is working on a collaborative effort involving cross-functional groups focusing on the nonprofit’s Web presence currently and over the next four years. For participants, he says, “it’s not extracurricular. It is part of their official duties and their managers apprise them on their participation. That really helps when it comes down to getting real work done.”

That ties back to the cultural imperative. Regehr stresses that for that kind of structure to work, CIOs have to have a place at the senior management table, and have a good relationship with their peers. “If that’s broken, the brokenness trickles down to other departments. If it’s healthy, it trickles down and facilitates collaboration where the real work gets done.”

Another advantage to collaboration is the speed with which companies can either innovate or consider more ideas faster. “The apex of collaboration is the support of innovation,” says Jay Rollins, former CIO of the Churchill Downs race track. “People in different groups start asking if something’s feasible, and they can quickly find an expert who can chime in.”

The Potential for Productivity

Once CIOs have dealt with internal issues, they must set up better systems for collaborating with customers and suppliers and getting their insights. This is where innovative collaboration can impact how you conduct business. Regehr explains that his association deals with more than 4,000 clubhouses managed by 1,160 groups. Each group submits information for an annual report through the B&GC’s Website, listing attendance, programs, budget, and even assets.

Companies that incorporate collaboration into the way they do business find that their processes improve. Sometimes even getting the same information faster means that businesses can respond more quickly to changing conditions. Regehr, for instance, is looking at speeding up the rate of information collection, which would automatically improve insight and give individual clubs the benefit of aggregated information.

“We’re starting to look at gathering that data as frequently as quarterly or even monthly,” says Regehr. “If it’s automated, we could reduce the amount of time it takes to create reports from a couple of months to overnight.” That way, pertinent information about programs that work can be promulgated among the groups much more quickly.

There are other economic elements driving the change in the ways companies collaborate. Gerry McCartney, CIO of Purdue University, works with CIOs at the other Big 10 universities in the Midwest to improve the group’s capabilities to attract scientific research grants. “A data center costs tens of millions to build and millions annually to run,” he says, adding that Purdue just deployed 800 terabytes of storage for researchers that he knows will be full in two years. “We’re looking at the idea of collaborating on building a common data center that we would share and rent out to various institutions as needed.”

Another advantage: each institution would have access to data from the others’ previous experiences. “We could store common data without duplicating it, and we wouldn’t have to use the network to send data back and forth between the researchers,” adds McCartney.

A trust network, of course, should encompass customers. Steve Balusek, senior principal consultant for collaboration and portals at global consulting firm BT INS, cites a financial services client that is opening up workflows to accommodate customers. For instance, when customers complain about credit-card charges, the financial services firm legally needs to respond within 10 days. When customers post their request on a Website, they essentially open a workflow that triggers an investigation on the inside to determine the request’s accuracy and a plan of action. “It changes the way they interact with customers, but it also automates key regulatory processes,” says Balusek.

Here’s another example of how that firm changed how it conducted business through collaboration, according to Balusek. The company wanted to develop continuous process improvement around the customer experience, but it had no mechanism for keeping track of either progress or proposals, especially across multiple regions. BT INS helped it set up a portal so that proposals are submitted online and tracked through a workflow process. “Someone is assigned responsibility for each initiative,” he says, “and now each region has visibility into the progress and results of these proposals in other regions.”

Similarly, says Fort, Virgin Entertainment’s vice president of marketing has started a blog, which takes the place of press releases. But at some point, he adds, the company will let members in its loyalty group post blogs on its Web-site as well; that generation is used to expressing its opinions online. Fort notes, “The generation that’s coming along demands that things be done their way. We have to go with that flow.”

Collaboration in a Changing World

Sam Ceccola, CTO of global consulting firm Capgemini, says he believes that when it comes to collaboration, companies have two choices. “You can deploy new technology but do business the old way, or you can implement new technology disruptively, which leads to new business models, new behavior patterns, and new incentives. There’s obviously risk, but if you want different output, you need different input.”

Put another way, you can go willingly, or unwillingly, but you’re going to end up collaborating. As B&GC’s Regehr puts it, “That’s the way the next generation thinks. Look at the way they use social networking – they understand how to collaborate and build teams. I’m excited about what the future holds for collaboration.”