Enhancing cooperation, innovation & collaboration with technology
Among the principles that may guide your deployment of enterprise collaboration software (aka “groupware”) such as Zimbra, many experts agree having a sense for the value of such a solution to your company should be your first priority.
Your team may be just you, your laptop and PDA, or it may many coworkers spanning the globe… how do you not only measure your company’s ability to communicate under day-to-day, common, often less-than-ideal circumstances, but also understand the prospective value of investments meant to improve collaboration?
If you’re part of a small business, imagine you’ve lost your organizer, or your laptop has just crashed. What would the value of knowing your information can be recovered easily, because it’s also stored on a centralized collaboration server?
If you’re part of a larger business, one method to begin to calculate the value of collaboration software is to identify how long it takes to organize an interdepartmental meeting. Try scheduling one! If it’s more “mental” than “interdepartment”, it’s high time for you to consider how recent advances in collaborative technology can help your team communicate more efficiently, and compete with those smaller companies that may gather on a dime to take advantage of opportunity.
As a manager, there are many other reasons to examine what technology can do to help your team collaborate, whether you’re a company of tens of thousands, or just one person who wants to use technology to compete with the best. Companies great and small suffer from the same challenge of identifying the information they need, and obtaining it when they need it, and no later!
IT managers and decisions makers must ask why should they spend more money for a collaboration solution, when for far less they can simply get outsourced POP accounts for their teams? Besides the lack of security of these accounts, which seldom use even basic security measures to keep your e-mail secure when sending to/from a public wireless network, the value an enterprise collaborative suite provides to most companies is material, and can be measured not only by the time-savings in organizing meetings, documenting communications, sharing contact lists and enabling employees to manage their own account options, but also by the ideas it enables your team to capture quickly enough to matter, recognize performance gaps, profit.
Most organizations can benefit from reducing the friction between employee communications. Tools such as Microsoft Exchange and Zimbra’s Collaboration Suite (ZCS), enable technology directors not only materially improve the efficiency of corporate communications, but also create opportunities for organizations by preparing them to capitalize profitably on internally developed, innovative, marketable ideas. They accomplish this by leveraging the power of social networks demonstrated by the success of websites such as YouTube, Amazon and Ebay, internally, for the benefit of your co-workers, employees, managers, customers and ultimately, shareholders.
From a manager’s point of view, the opportunity for more profit from collaboration does not rest only on the shoulders of the technology you choose to deploy. From experience, how you decide to deploy collaborative technology is at least as important as the tools you use. We’ll address specific, tactical best-practices in organizing your groups and sharing policies in future posts.
For your reference:
Gartner’s Betsy Burton writes that most companies don’t understand the value that collaboration creates, here’s her analysis.
Cross and Parker’s The Hidden Power of Social Networks delivers a 5-star analysis of and practical guide to exploiting the opportunities presented by collaborative tools like Zimbra for today’s businesses.
Here’s a Harvard Business Review article about the parallels between open source communities and F500 manufacturing: Scholarly article about efficient models of collaboration.
An article from 2005, mostly focusing on larger corporations, and providing a good context for groupware and enterprise collaboration technology decision-making: A Travel Guide to Collaboration.
Here’s a book published by the National Science Foundation that explores the challenges of collaborating on top of sophisticated, electronic tools such as Zimbra (ZCS): Coordination Theory and Collaboration Technology.
Here’s a book offering the results of more than a decade’s research on the taxonomy of business collaboration, a useful philosophical underpinning for deploying successful collaborative environments, by MIT’s Thomas Malone: Organizing Business Knowledge: The MIT Process Handbook.
