Executive Thought Leadership

Collaboration: Transforming the Way Business Works

In the "Foresight 2020" study conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) in 2006, executives predicted that over the next 15 years their markets will become even more global, functions within their organizations will atomize across geographies and partners, and competition will intensify from new corners of the world. To succeed in this environment, organizations need to collaborate with thousands of specialized players.

As part of a research program that arose from this study, the EIU surveyed 394 business leaders worldwide for a Cisco-sponsored survey gauging the extent to which collaboration is being encouraged, managed, and measured in both the private and public sectors.

There were four major findings:

• Companies are indeed facing a new imperative to form collaborative relationships.
• Companies face challenges in establishing processes and in measuring and monitoring the benefits of collaboration
• Despite the promise of technology, there is still dissatisfaction with online collaboration tools.

1. Senior executives understand that success depends on collaborating across greater distances—physical, cultural, and organizational.

There was near-universal agreement that collaborative relationships are therefore growing increasingly crucial to business success. Sixty-three percent of executives said they would spend more time working with teams in different locations over the next three years. Just over one-half expect to work more with people outside their function or organization. General Motors, GlaxoSmithKline, Procter & Gamble, Intel, and Warsteiner (a German beer company) all described major initiatives and highlighted the importance of these collaborations to achieving their business objectives.

2. Successful collaboration requires a cultural shift that is already well underway.

A strong culture of collaboration exists at many of the organizations. Employees trust each other. Sharing is more prevalent than secrecy. Communication is frequent and open. Employees actively seek specialized knowledge from other organizations, and more than 80 percent want to partner with other organizations.

3. Companies face challenges in establishing processes and measuring and monitoring the benefits of collaboration.

Employee attitudes are not always backed up by high-level reinforcement and incentives. In many cases, senior management fails to establish collaboration processes, explain the benefits, publicize successes, or reward collaborators. As difficult as it may seem, some companies have established extensive metrics. GlaxoSmithKline, for example, designed time-based metrics for evaluating collaboration at its New Jersey-based R&D hub.

4. Despite the promise of technology, there is still dissatisfaction with online collaboration tools.

Despite the rise of powerful networks with universal connectivity, there is little consensus on the most-effective ways to use technology to facilitate collaboration. Executives use e-mail, instant messaging, shared calendars, intranets, and web conferencing, but they do not feel that current tools add much to the collaborative process. For example, while virtually everyone uses e-mail, only 61 percent find it useful.

For more information on collaboration and how it can evolve your business, please refer to the full report from the EIU, Transforming the way business works (PDF). The study is one of three published in 2007 as part of a research program that arose from the EIU’s March 2006 “Foresight 2020”report sponsored by Cisco. This report highlighted a number of important changes to the world economy over the next 15 years. The principal trends the report identified—globalization, demographics, atomization, personalization, and knowledge management—will have a profound effect on the landscape of major industries and the inner workings of companies worldwide.

Three themes were developed into separate research projects: collaboration, innovation and collaboration were studied. The results of each study are intended to stand independently and to fit together, describing from different vantage points the development of the interactions economy, in which customers, suppliers, workers, owners, and others go beyond mere transactions to exchange information for mutual benefit.