A new tools are changing the way people work with each other, the partners of their companies and their customers. By Jeffrey F. Rayport
Since the dawn of capitalism, management, collaboration and have almost always been synonymous. People need other people to achieve greater impact, and innovation, perhaps the most valuable activity in business, mainly depends on cross pollination of ideas that enables collaboration. However
technology has changed the way we work together, especially since the communications revolution began 150 years ago with the telegraph and telephone. This wave of change continued with the marketing of the fax machine in the 70's and email in the 80's. The last 20 years have seen a convergence of communications and computing technologies has expanded the possibilities of collaboration based on the technology, either synchronous or asynchronous, near or far. With voice mail, videoconferencing, instant messaging, forums, blogs, wikis, social networks, microblogging (through services like Twitter and Foursquare), voice over IP, telepresence, and, of course, mobile communications and computer we have never had to reach so many ways to collaborate without having to be in the same place at the same time.
based platforms in technology and specifically designed for collaboration emerged in the late 80's with the concept of "groupware" or collaborative work environments. " These made it possible for people to join while operating in different places and in different time zones. Lotus Notes introduced this notion in a corporate market during a time when the commercial Internet was still in diapers. As noted by reporter David Kirkpatrick in 1992, "if the groupware really makes a difference in long-term productivity, the very definition of an office can change. "With admirable foresight, said:" You will be able to work efficiently as a member of a group where you have your computer. As computers become smaller and more powerful, it means that we can do it from anywhere. "
That prediction has come true, especially since the recent financial crisis. While companies cut workers and resources, number of professionals who are defined as self-employed increased to 30 million in the United States, and many of them turned to social networking sites like LinkedIn and Facebook, to build their businesses. Many of the people that continued to be used the same strategies employed as an insurance policy against the next downsizing. Also offset reductions in IT budgets by using their own hardware, creating new acronyms such as BYOD (bring your own device "," bring your own device) and BYOC (bring your own computer "," bring your own computer). In fact, Kraft Foods "accepted" the use of smart phones and tablets owned by employees, giving explicitly welcoming and supporting devices "third parties" not directly purchased by the company.
These policies, in turn, created a new meaning for BYOC: bring your own culture "(" bring your own culture "). Why? Workers equipped with their own smart phones and laptops are accustomed to use the devices as they wanted to. They demanded free access to rich media web sites (like YouTube), social networking platforms and some content providers (eg publishers and media WikiLeaks documents, such as the New York Times and CNN.com) that many companies and government agencies had been blocked due to costs of bandwidth, data protection and enterprise security. A senior executive at Dell with which argued that if I was going to happen 60 to 80 hours a week at work, the company had no right to limit any Internet content. The corporate firewall, designed to make a very marked distinction between resources and external information, it became an artifact of a bygone era. The executive director of Dell prevailed.
collaboration enabled by the network both within and between companies is changing the fundamental way of working.
To drive this revolution, both established companies and startups are offering tools and platforms that support collaborative media increasingly powerful. Their business proposals based on Metcalfe's Law: As links between individuals increase arithmetically, the collaboration as a result of these links would markedly increase its value. That's why many companies trying to accelerate the pace of innovation passed to open innovation.
Here are seven major issues that we must be vigilant:
1. We must bring all the world's consumers. As workers have more options for use of smart devices and online resources, your expectations have changed even with respect to the physical appearance of many workplaces. It makes sense that a design firm in the UK, Morgan Lovell, specializes in the creation of similar offices to living rooms and cafes, to encourage greater interaction. For the same reason, many technology platforms for collaboration in the world take advantage of the experiences of consumers. During its heyday, Second Life, Linden Lab, organized a dealer of Toyota Scion brand, allowing buyers to customize their new cars as they exchanged ideas between them. Second Life also provided a platform for the annual meeting of world leaders at the World Economic Forum, was, in effect, a virtual Davos that operated at the same time as real. Researchers at the University of California at Irvine, with three million dollar grant from the National Science Foundation, now plan to study how virtual worlds like Second Life and online multiplayer games like World of Warcraft can help organizations to collaborate and compete more effectively.
Less radical is the appearance of IBM collaboration software to corporate clothing has many familiar consumer applications: examples include Dogear (social bookmarking application like Delicious), Blu Twit (an imitation of Twitter owned companies), and SocialBlue (an internal platform for social networks much like Facebook). Similarly, the Cisco collaboration software, called Quad, integrates WebEx with third-party resources like Twitter, iGoogle, and custom RSS feeds. Its home page, or "personal manager of the console is based on widgets. Its design resembles the presentation layer of a popular personal news site based in Paris, NetVibes. However, we must not misinterpret the informal aspect of the interface: Quad also includes a "policy management console business" that controls the responsibility for tasks, individual productivity, and compliance with company policy.
2. It is culture. International Data Corporation, an IT research firm, says that we are entering "a new phase of collaboration business "based on the" intersection of Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0 and collaboration tools to form a social enterprise. "Although IDC believes the worldwide market for collaborative applications, in general, this" mature enough "is projected revenue from specifically social platforms will increase from $ 390 million in 2009 to almost 2 billion in 2014. The firm says that this growth is being driven by functions of "social business" similar to what we know as Social Web: connecting people, conversations, file sharing and online social interaction to deal with common business objectives. Functions include other essential functions from the social web, social bookmarking, blogging, microblogging, polls, ratings, RSS, tags, and wikis for what IDC calls "people-centered collaboration and communication", "open and non-synchronized structured. "
When all this is put into operation, it becomes the "human tag"-a concept that came in technology circles only a couple of years. This is a business resource that goes beyond the corporation, by linking their employees not only among themselves but also with customers, partners, suppliers and third party resources. "The only tools offer the potential to carry out the collaboration, "says Evan Rosen, a leading thinker in this field." Unlocking the value of tools only occurs when an organization the tools fit into a culture and processes of collaboration. If culture is hierarchical and internally competitive, should be used more than tools to change the culture. "In other words, do not assume it will be a collaboration of high performance just because you own the tools to make this possible. Collaboration is a social phenomenon, and has to fit with the culture of an organization.
3. Take care of your experts, not to documents. The most promising of the human tag is that peer-to-peer (or networks of networks) will create value in a business. Apart from patent protection, the value of the intellectual property of the company decreases with each passing month, due to the rapidity with which rivals are able to imitate the products. Look at how quickly imitated HTC Touch screen interface "revolutionary" iPhone using the Android operating system. Companies often use a feature known as "knowledge management" to preserve, classify and search internal documents, but what happens when the value of the materials is reduced to zero in record time? The focus moves from the documents to experts, the people able to create the next innovation.
Consider a recent initiative at Intuit. In the words of the company, created a platform called Brainstorm as a "tool of management innovation to foster collaboration across the organization and help put good ideas to work faster." Shows the human tag action ("to get the best talent available regardless of location.") You can not find the talent without the "visibility" as a critical component of Brainstorm is the "labeling" of experts within the organization. Intuit provided a platform where employees could post challenges, and (following the footsteps of Google) said 10 percent of the time of its employees as "informal" to encourage participation. In addition, Intuit recruited a dozen college students on a development program. They, in turn, contributed to Intuit any collaboration tool based on consumers that they liked, including Facebook, Google Docs, wikis, blogs and instant messages. Recognition Systems awarded what was more important: "the construction of ideas and connections." The result? Participation in innovation activities increased fivefold. Time to market is reduced by half. And annual releases of new products increased from five to 31. Today, Intuit sold Brainstorm to companies belonging to Fortune 1,000, universities and governments. Verily, Intuit has seen ten times return on their investment after the use of Brainstorm and, according to a special report from GigaOm Pro, the company has seen similar benefits among customers who have provided the tool.
4. Build a knowledge factory is open 24 hours. I borrow this phrase quaint title of a 2004 research paper done by two students at MIT, Amar Gupta and Satwik Seshasai, who observed that managers of companies with workers both in the United States and India believed that misalignment of time zones was an obstacle to collaboration. Today, it is clear otherwise. Seshasai Gupta were among the first to notice: by combining a sufficient amount of time zones you get an organization that never sleeps, thus providing a natural advantage to the product development cycle times or service delivery.
When global collaboration works, either within a company or between companies, the results can be impressive. Conversify, for example, is an agency of social media marketing managers based in Alaska, Denver, Boston, and the United Kingdom Even for a small organization, the geographical distribution makes it easy to monitor and manage social media all day. It also creates a virtuous time warp: according to one of his managers said, "When we have something due on Monday, I feel like I have two Mondays for it." In global companies such as Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Cisco, Wipro, Tata and HCL, this type of scheduling approach and global reach has become commonplace: the project teams linked through three or four zones work continuously and move into a kind of perpetual motion. This is what scholars Morten Hansen and Nitin Nohria defined for almost a decade as a source of "collaborative advantage."
5. Term structure within the social cacophony. Companies should not be induced to think that metaphors of social media conversational eliminate the need to have structure, discipline, and protocols. On the contrary, the use of strict guidelines and terms of participation defined is even more critical. The application programming interface (API), closed or open, is a good metaphor. Want to work with Google, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, RIM or Yelp? Want to get put an application in one of their stores in your applications? The API and codes specified embedded structures and the avenues available for collaboration.
management framework Drupal open source web is another example of how a structure can be configured to enable online collaboration in social settings. (Dries Buytaert, a computer scientist in the Netherlands, created Drupal in 2001 and wanted to call it "dorp", which means "village" in Dutch, and finally wrote the wrong word to find a domain name, ended the Drupal word and thought sounded better.) Unlike Linux, an open source operating system that did not become popular until outside companies like Red Hat provide support business, Drupal has grown through collaboration between users and web developers. Its strength lies in its simplicity, while offering a sophisticated API for Developers do not need programming knowledge to create and manage a basic website. As a result, in 2010 ran on 7,200,000 Drupal websites, including www.whitehouse.gov and www.data.gov.uk. Its modular design, extensibility, plug-and-play and free downloads accelerated its popularity. A community supports it, a series of volunteer developers make better, and the "collective" approach uses a heuristics to improve it. (Drupal has expanded into a commercial entity Acquia, with which services to build websites.) A similar history of social partnership has resulted in the popularity of Ruby on Rails.
6. Listen to the wisdom of the people working for you, of any people. Think "crowdsourcing" as a kind of mass market collaboration. So much talent as the inventory can be ordered from third parties as we want it.
crowdSPRING, an online advertising agency, offers users the ability to specify the design tasks (eg, treatment brand, logo, or the execution of an advertising message), post RFPs structured online and wait for "Offers" for the job. A simple application may generate dozens of presentations of designs in 24 to 48 hours. Only the winning proposal (if the user selects a) receives payment. This is an example of demand for talent.
Meanwhile, Threadless, which began in 2000, is now the paradigmatic example of crowdsourcing on the web. It is an ecommerce store that sells T-shirts designed by a community of users, who send 300 designs to the site every day, the site's fans vote for the ones they like, and the winning designs make their creators earn $ 2,000 each one. The aim is to publish seven shirt designs new week and sell the designs for three to eight weeks. In 2009, the site generated more than $ 30 million in revenue.
The contrast between these two sites, however, illustrates an important lesson. The collaboration enabled by network technologies works best for intensive tasks based on knowledge and information. While Threadless runs a complete business process from design to manufacturing and distribution, crowdSPRING not. Once a "client" has chosen a creative execution, yet there remains the task of making something that is real-print materials, create a video or online advertising, and work with the media. In that sense, the "crowdsourcing" highlights a key issue for any work completed by a type of partnership based on technology: what part of the desired outcome or solution is actually given by the collaboration?
A completely different application of "crowdsourcing" comes in the form of prediction markets. " These can be helpful in formulating strategies and product planning. For example, Best Buy stores use an internal prediction market, called TagTrade, to harness collective intelligence of its tens of thousands of employees at different stores. In 2003, DARPA also tried to implement a prediction market: The Policy Analysis Market (or PAM), whose purpose was to anticipate future terrorist attacks. (When members of Congress denounced as "grotesque" the fact of allowing online users to "bet" on "atrocities and terrorism", PAM was discarded.) These markets represent a third type of "crowdsourcing" that is, of many ways more profound: the means to harness the collective intelligence.
7. We must be realistic. The disadvantage of working with knowledge-the lifeblood of technology-based collaboration-is its intangibility. It is hard to see our colleagues at a distance, or a set of tasks and deadlines abstract. The most promising collaboration tools, therefore, are those that provide updates on team members, relevant news, project reports, alerts on deadlines, and other visual reminders to make the intangible tangible. This is especially critical for those workers who are alone in remote locations or to work in abstract tasks.
For example, DreamWorks Animation has created a global workspace called Virtual Studio Collaboration. Combines animation design tools, video conferencing and high definition telepresence to enable artists from all over the world to work together in films. Their collaboration, which once was sequential, now takes place in real time, and technology makes your connections are palpable and immediate.
Similarly, some argue that the success of Boeing's 787 Dreamliner is due in part to the way the company integrated collaboration tools with applications that engineers use to design the products themselves. His rival, Airbus, which had no such tools display of high technology and advanced aerospace design software, was at the same time several costly failures, including delays in delivery A380.
Many of the most important collaboration tools (including Jive, Traction and SocialText) specializes in the display of the "pattern" of collaboration. In addition, technologies such as near field communications (NFC) that employees can be even more "real" through its monitoring and virtual connection as they move through the physical world. The NFC system can instantly synchronize mobile devices with information resources, secure access to encrypted Wi-Fi networks, and coordinate the physical movement of remote team members to increase cooperation, accessibility and accountability by work. Jeffrey F.
Rayport specializes in analyzing the strategic implications of digital technologies for business and organizational design. He is president of MarketspaceNext, a strategic advisory firm, also is operating partner in Castanea Partners, and former faculty member of Harvard Business School. Carine Carmy contributed research for this article.
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