Business of the Future: How Collaboration Platforms Provide the Advantage

Part 1 - Why Collaboration is the Key to Success we looked at the importance of collaboration to a company and why it is so vital to fostering business success.

In this article we’ll delve into the specifics of implementing collaboration platforms in your business, covering the hows and whys of this sometimes confusing topic.

Every Business Is Different

Without wanting to state the obvious, it is true to say that every business is unique and because of this, every business has needs that unique. It is vital, therefore, that you take time to think about what it is that you want this new platform to do, and understand how it will both change and benefit the company, before you jump into spending money and implementing a collaboration platform. It is important to identify what you want from this tool.

Selecting a collaboration platform that suits your aims, needs and working environment is crucial to success. Integrating a collaboration platform isn’t merely about updating some software; the end goal is to decidedly alter the culture of the business for the better.

Examples Of Success

A good example that illustrates the incredible changes that can be wrought within a business environment through the use of a collaboration platform alone is the runaway success at the UK’s Department for Work and Pensions (DWP). The UK’s largest public service department and one of the country’s biggest employers with over 120,000 staff, the DWP utilized a Spigit platform to shake up its work culture. Spigit’s cloud-based crowdsourcing approach was ideal for a large employer that was looking for ways to engage its staff and generate new ideas. Through the use of this tool, the DWP accomplished greater interaction between its work force as well as a saving of £20 million, found through staff suggestions.

While this success story is a particularly strong example of the benefits of collaboration, it is by no means alone. Time and again successes like this are seen as silos are broken and information is shared.

Uses Of Collaboration Platforms

Platforms like Quip, Slack, Office365 and Atlassian’s Confluence help streamline team work to produce more effective project plans, budgets or press releases. Confluence’s ability to centralize and make available all documents, allows real-time revision from colleagues, bringing alternative and thought-provoking ideas to the table. Knowledge is readily available and work output is optimized. Errors are reduced and travel costs saved. It is benefits like these that provide a time and cost advantage and allow a business to alter its work mode as the nature of business becomes more mobile and dispersed.

Need For Management To Be Onboard

Without the participation of employees, collaboration is null and void. And to promote the engagement of employees in any organization managers must be fully onboard. The change requires interaction between executives and staff both on the platform and off, as behaviours in the work place and executive’s willingness to listen will affect employee’s willingness to participate. Similarly, a show of implementing some suggestions - or at least commenting upon them - exhibits the management’s commitment.

Collaboration provides feedback loops and transparency so that each action taken by a member of staff can be learned from a built upon. Decisions can be made further down the chain of hierarchy by less senior staff, but who are directly involved in the process. This move offers staff a change to take responsibility for their actions and a feeling of involvement. This change also removes the need for management to be omniscient and to sign off on everything.

Manager’s made need time to get used to this new way of working, but it will build a more efficient machine. These platforms instill communication, improvement and constant learning. As was mentioned earlier, integrating business collaboration isn’t just rolling out some software: it is changing the very culture of business. Ultimately, this leads to further equality, the acceptance of personal responsibility, and company growth.

Nicki Doble is Managing Director of 99th Floor. 99th Floor is a digital consultancy firm which helps its clients create and deliver their digital strategy (simply).

Challenge - let's build a sticky innovative platform for a transformational economy

An idea from Professor Caroline Wagner - Ohio State University

How to engage students, innovators to collaborate and grow

The Pain

• The diffusion deficit - A weakness exists in the local links between the University and innovative actors in the region, exacerbated by a lack of incentives to create these links. 

• The data deficit - Numerous events in the physical world leave “data traces” in isolated silos that could be useful to the knowledge economy--but, the data are at different granularities and they lack interoperability; paucity of knowledge access and flow inhibits the pace of research and innovation. 

•   The insight deficit - difficulty in processing and analusing the data into meaningful information - Add to this problem that over 80% of data analytics time is spent in time-consuming pre-processing tasks and we have an insight deficit.

• The attraction deficit - The Knowledge exodus -   Smart students leave the region to go to innovation-rich regions.  

How do we keep them ? In order to keep them in the region, we need to create local opportunities for them to be entrepreneurial – to solve problems and re-invent locally.  

A Potential Pain Killer

National service in an Altruistic Capacity  Right now, our pro-social students are overwhelmingly attracted to a year of service at Teach for America, City Year, Peace Corps, ViSTA –

• how can we harvest these altruistic vitalities towards building the local and regional economy—to grow the society they want to live in right where they live? 

• how can we link students with local enterprises that will simultaneously build the data we need, create the local links, give students a chance to create their own jobs/businesses/non-profit start-ups, all while making data-for-innovation available to larger groups and decision makers? Let’s call this: Catalyzing innovative energy.

HOW DO WE SCALE THIS VISION?

How can we find a way to get the funding needed to: 

1. pay students; 
2. seed pro-social enterprises; 
3. create an open data platform for innovation; 
4. link students to faculty (who are themselves linked to the global knowledge network) to diffuse knowledge to make it locally available???

 Let’s call this: building a sticky innovative platform for a transformational economy.

That is my challenge to you – help me design this system from the ground up, tap dynamism, incentivize growth – include the poorest and excluded in the development. Ideas needed!