Collaboration: A Business Process to Produce Results

There's a lot of industry buzz this year on technologies for team activities in business. Most of this buzz uses the term collaboration, though some just stick with the technology names - video, conferencing, content management, mobility or social. There was buzz about this at the recent Lync Conference 14 and there will be more buzz at the upcoming Enterprise Connect 2014 conference in Orlando. In addition, we are sure to see a number of posts, webinars and white papers on the topic.

There are two major sources of this buzz:

1. The technology. Just listen to the vendors and you'll think that unlimited bandwidth and video everywhere is the magical answer to all collaboration problems. Sure, 4GLTE and Wi-Fi almost everywhere provide the necessary bandwidth almost everywhere. And, sure, the mobile devices and laptops all have HD (or better) camera and displays. Sure, WebRTC and other browser technologies can provide a voice and video experience on any of these devices. And, sure, the arrival of software-based conferencing applications that interoperate with all of these different end-points, including older room video systems, provides a huge range of choices. So, we have a lot of new choices, but what to do with them?
   
   
2. The business process: This is where collaboration really comes into focus. Collaboration is actually a process by which a team of people produce a desired outcome in an optimal way. The outcome may multiple dimensions including speed to completion, quality of the work or design or decision, cost of the activity, and other parameters. The point is that a collaboration is something that an enterprise, whether in the public and private sector, does to produce a specific result. And, as with all economic activity, there is a constant emphasis on doing it with in less time, with better quality, and/or for less cost. Since collaborative activities often represent a sizable portion of the workforce, ranging as high as 50 percent or more of the workforce in sectors such as professional services, enterprises are eager to improve collaboration and to capture the profits - growing revenues or cutting costs - from that improvement.

Given these two converging forces, there's no wonder that "collaboration" is a hot topic.

However, the key for enterprises is to look at the first point in context of the second point, i.e. to make investments that produce results! (See "Invest on Returns") It may be a good strategy to deploy the new technologies to some extent so that employees can understand what tools are available and thereby participate in the design of collaboration process improvements, but that's not the end of the journey and is unlikely to produce attractive or compelling ROI.

This has been a visible theme for years, from the beginning of UC as the organizing motif for enterprise communications. This 2011 post on "UC, UCC, and Collaboration" is still very valid as the basis for realizing improvements in collaborative processes. That article also links to this 2009 post on "Collaboration in the 2.0 Enterprise" that highlights some solid work by IBM on the structure of collaborations as Ad Hoc, Activity Centric, and Formal. Clearly, it will make sense to use a different set of UC&C and Social tools for each of those three types of collaboration.

As suggested in those articles, the best way to improve or optimize a collaborative project is to select the best tools for each task in the collaborative process. For examples:

• If one of the team members has compiled data for others to use, the best UC tool is probably to post that data to the team's collaborative workspace, which will then notify each participant via each person's preferred notification channel (e-mail, cellar text, social, etc.). A video call would be a waste of both knowledge worker time and technology expense.
  
  
• If a team member needs a quick answer from an expert elsewhere in the company, a quick skills search to show presence availability followed by an Instant Messaging chat may do the job. Even better if this search and chat can happen from within the collaborative project workspace.
  
  
• If the team needs an "all brains on deck" discussion of a crucial decision in the project, then a video collaboration session with content sharing will likely be best. In many cases, the best solution may be to meet from the users' devices rather than gathering in a conference room, so as to minimize the time delays to gather in a single location.

Rather than listing many, many similar examples, it's clear that any major collaborative process can be examined and redesigned based on the complete set of new UC&C and social communications tools - both non-real-time and real-time - using the most appropriate tools and media for each task.

So, as we are surrounded by the buzz of collaboration this year, let's do our best to make UC a really valuable investment by showing our enterprise customers that we are applying all of these new tools in order to produce better results, not just to fund a plethora of shiny objects and generic UC interfaces. I look forward to working with all of you to make this happen for the benefit of the entire industry.