Collaboration means working together in a joint intellectual effort. More than 60 percent of the workforce believes colleagues can help them do their jobs better. Collectively, this means extending the potential of the enterprise. Companies have spent trillions on information management systems but that investment would mean little if it does not enable teams to collaborate, work smarter, connect to more resources, improve productivity, reduce time and travel, improve efficiency, and save money.
The primary parts of modern business collaboration reveal something about its power in transforming the enterprise. Let’s look at the four pillars of successful collaboration:
• Messaging — Enables teams and individuals to communicate and manage their interactions in an auditable manner. This is important for compliance and replicating success. In effect, it is establishing a proven template.
• Real time — Speed is crucial in collaboration because information and processes must be timely.
• Team — The group effort demands strong ties to the unit because only through teamwork will collaboration help people work smarter and drive business benefits by deepening valuable relationships, making better decisions faster, spurring innovation, and reducing costs.
• Social Networking — Represents the newest pillar in collaboration, where individuals share knowledge not only within the team, but the company itself.
As teams embark on collaborative efforts, there is a perpetual lifecycle of collaboration. This lifecycle also reveals the importance of workflow. There is a series of steps in collaboration, facilitated with workflow:
• Awareness — becoming part of a working entity with a shared purpose
• Motivation — driving to gain consensus in problem solving or development
• Self-synchronization — deciding as individuals when things need to happen
• Participation — participating in collaboration and we expect others to participate
• Mediation — negotiating and collaborating together to find a middle point
• Reciprocity — sharing and expecting sharing in return through reciprocity
• Reflection —thinking and considering alternatives
• Engagement — proactively engaging rather than wait and see.
The organization benefits throughout the collaboration lifecycle because it is financially healthy decision-making. The benefits of collaboration include improving the bottom line by addressing cost, competitiveness, and continuity.
First, collaboration cuts costs by reducing personnel, travel, and infrastructure costs by up to 80 percent. That is funding that in turn can be used to help grow the business. Bringing the right people together to create, share, discuss, and manage information and facilitate innovation means more productivity for less cost.
Second, collaboration makes an organization more competitive by increasing efficiencies, planning, and responsiveness. Personnel are empowered to be creative and participate in solving issues so business moves faster. And, controlled agility is built into collaboration with workflow. Fewer people need to be involved in the delivery or routing of documents, thus reducing the likelihood of lost or improperly routed information while insuring that the documents get to the right people as quickly and directly as possible. In addition, workflow-enabled collaboration reveals missed or overlooked variables that could lend greater value to the enterprise.
Third, collaboration is good for business continuity because it fosters improvement and enlivens operations. The carbon footprint is reduced. Audit trails are more easily followed. The company, through workflow and collaboration, builds an adaptive culture and agile enterprise that can duck and weave in the worst of economic times. Organizational know-how is captured for the future while establishing proven, bottom-line-driven processes that can be repeatable and teachable, perpetuating company capabilities. In addition, collaboration helps address compliance, eDiscovery, and Disaster Recovery.
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