Tags Strategy, Collaboration, Communication

No business is an island

Businesses are breaking down the walls and bringing everyone together for a more collaborative future. Pat Sweet finds out more about working well with others.

Knowledge may be power, but for many organisations, this means hiding the secrets of its innermost workings from colleagues as well as competitors. This is not to say that we should all be throwing open our doors – that’s just transparency gone mad. Ultimately, to unlock the true value in their stores of corporate information, companies need to learn to collaborate.

Trevor Burrows, IT director at household appliance manufacturer Morphy Richards knows all about collaboration. The company’s products are manufactured in the Far East and this generates hundreds of different documents – from product specifications to test data sheets – which travel between offices in the UK, Hong Kong and China. The only problem with this is that the system in use couldn’t guarantee security, transparency and a consistent workflow in the business.

The answer was a collaborative email system: “We put a business application in place through which documents will flow formally,” says Burrows. “This will improve supply chain efficiency and create more transparent working practices, which is ideally what we want.”

Morphy Richards worked with IBM Premier Business Partner ThroughBox IT in order to find the optimum solution and a course of action soon became clear: “If we had simply upgraded our existing system, it would have involved buying and integrating thirdparty collaboration tools.

“It made more sense to go with a fully-integrated solution, which was available at virtually the same cost – Domino, running under Red Hat Linux® on two IBM eServer xSeries servers. We saw no reason to re-invent the wheel.

“Best of all, this opened the door to a range of collaborative solutions, from instant messaging to virtual meetings – this helps us cut costs and accelerate time-to-market.”

Of course, collaboration calls for a significant shift in the corporate mindset. Many businesses are still seriously hierarchical, with employees repelling any attempt at what they see as encroachment from another division or department. This makes collaboration tricky to introduce, but when it’s good, it can be very, very good.

“Businesses use collaboration to address a broad range of issues. Some to change patterns of work between employees, others to improve the way they interact with customers and suppliers,” says Tony Bellis, CEO of ThroughBox IT, an IBM Business Partner in Manchester. “One successful collaboration project can quickly lead to the concept really taking off in an organisation and people begin to wonder how they ever managed without it. Typically, collaboration projects build on existing IT systems so, there’s no rip and replace, just added value. It’s important to identify the right project to start with, otherwise, momentum can slow. But when successful, collaboration projects can express what is different about a company and what makes it better than its competitors.”

Evolutionary thinking

Back in the eighties, early collaboration efforts were driven by productivity tools like spreadsheets and databases, which could be networked. Employees who could use the software to automate repetitive numbercrunching tasks saved themselves hours of time and effort, which was a good thing, but fairly basic.

The nineties introduced groupware – essentially the same kind of productivity software made more widely available via the Internet or a company’s intranet. The winners in this round of high-tech innovation were the teams who could now combine their efforts more efficiently and share at least some of their data to gain better insights.

In the noughties, it’s all about workplace-based collaboration, where everyone in an organisation is able to work together to improve not only productivity, but also performance.

By breaking down boundaries, companies can create collaborative enterprises where each individual’s effort enhances that of his or her peers, and where specialist knowledge can be captured and re-used for the benefit of all. The result is a faster, more responsive and flexible business.

Portal technology is key, providing a central “pot” into which all corporate information can be poured. For those dipping in to that pot, the portal offers a single sign-in point and offers access to all the data and systems they need.

This means fewer passwords and applications – and each person’s view of the information accessed via the portal can be personalised. The finance department can drop right to the bottom line of the monthly figures, while others will have a handful of key indicators highlighted.

For the IT department, a portal is a robust technical platform, which can be scaled up or down in size to match individual needs and can drive down IT costs while speeding up delivery of new applications. Via the portal, for example, employees can make sure that they’re working on the latest version of the company’s guidelines immediately, or accessing the latest price list or the most recent account of customer buying patterns. Add in instant messaging, document management, Web content and Web conferencing, and it’s possible to build a lean, fast operation where queries can be raised and resolved faster than ever.

“For the first time, people are being offered the ability to work collaboratively in context,” explains Martin Smith, portal and workplace sales leader for IBM Software, North Region. “They can use the Web-based facilities to collaborate as they’re working, instead of having to come out of what they were doing in order to use collaboration tools elsewhere.”

The same benefits can apply to the supply chain as well. Collaborative planning, forecasting and replenishment (CPFR) has long been a goal for many, but a success for a very few.
The trouble is, this means sharing high quality data between partners – only then can companies influence developments along their supply chain.

CPFR initiatives have often been stalled because of three common fears: mistrust over sharing data; difficulties over the choice of technology; and the problems of achieving a critical mass.

With portals and other Web-based options, many of these fears can be laid to rest. Only the data a company wants to show to its partners will be made available to the outside world – the operational applications will remain untouched.

Web-based facilities do not demand that each application is specially tailored to meet the technical needs of each partner, and so it is more likely that take-up will spread more widely. If this keeps up, we may all be working together some day. And that is a powerful idea.

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