The Collaboration Program

The Collaboration Program

Companies and governments are making dramatic improvements in their performance and innovation by implementing new suites of tools for collaboration. Combining industrial-strength social networks, blogs, microblogging, wikis, new generation document tools, collaborative decision making, and new generation knowledge management, these collaborative platforms are beginning to transform the companies, government bureaucracies, and the nature of work itself. Sometimes called Enterprise Social Networking, together these tools are creating nothing less than a New Operating System for the organization.

But how do you get started? How can you determine your needs, build a business case, implement the technology and manage change? The Tapscott Group has a proven method for making collaboration happen in your organization.

Today’s Context

A perfect storm of powerful forces is driving businesses towards more open and transparent social models of value creation. What’s occurring is the most dramatic change in the vertically integrated corporation since its inception. Traditional command-and-control hierarchies are giving away to better-performing networked enterprises. In the public sector, old models of industrial-age bureaucracies are stalled or failing in most parts of the world. It’s time to actually “reinvent government.”

These changes are being driven by a technology push, a demand pull, and a demographic kick.

The second generation Internet (Web 2.0) is combining with mobility to provide a technology push for a new era of collaboration. Electronic mail is yesterday’s technology. Today people can now work together as teams as peers and collaborate with talent outside the boundaries of organizations. Research shows the results are lower costs, a higher organizational metabolism, better innovation and superior performance.

The new global business environment is creating a demand pull for a new breed of high performance companies that are flatter and more collaborative. Once the mantra was to think globally but act locally. Now one needs to think and act globally. Innovation is paramount and the economy has become real-time. Only fast, productive and creative firms will survive.

Accelerating the trend towards more collaborative business models is as a demographic kick of a new generation of employees. Often called digital natives, today’s youth have grown up online and surrounded by digital technologies. They have at their fingertips more powerful collaborative tools that exist in many of our most sophisticated private- and public-sector organizations. As Don Tapscott explained in Grown Up Digital, this generation’s culture is one of freedom, peer collaboration, innovation, speed, customization, integrity and fun. In that culture is the new culture of work.

Digital technologies and social media have transformed the personal lives of young adults and many of their baby boomer parents. Businesses and government are looking for ways to exploit similar tools to boost collaboration and leverage the collective intelligence of employees and their network’s collective intelligence.

What We Do

Every organization is now challenged with the question: How to embrace these new powerful collaborative tools and models?

The Tapscott Group has the answers, extending the pioneering thinking behind Macrowikinomics. We design and architect the fundamental building blocks for implementing Enterprise Social Networking. We will develop a social strategy for your business that leverages the collective intelligence of your extended enterprise and focuses collaboration towards actionable business decisions.

We offer a proven methodology to find the opportunities for “social productivity” and to optimize the methods in the transformation from hierarchical to managed collaborative enterprises.

We use social media and monitoring tools to help define, and refine a company’s social strategy to optimize the benefits to our clients. Tapscott Group has developed successful social strategies for both governments and large businesses.

Why We Do It

From the Gartner article “Failure Mode: Collaboration and Social Initiatives without Success Criteria”, Tom Austin recently predicted that a majority of collaboration projects will fail through at least 2016. Companies cannot afford to implement social software without a clear vision of what is expected. At today’s speed of change, poor implementations can create invisible “we tried that and it doesn’t work” barriers to doing what is necessary to survive and thrive. We have the processes and methods necessary to succeed out of the gate.

How We Do It

Adoption is the key challenge, so our approach focuses on engaging employees to help them learn more about these tools and the new opportunities. The starting point is an executive briefing about collaboration and its opportunities from the world’s leading authority on the topic – Don Tapscott. The goal is to get support and buy in for the project.

Then through a series of facilitated interviews and workshops, we engage key stakeholders in rethinking how the people in your organization could work together. Analyzing the data gathered in these workshops, we map the value network (how and where is value created), collaboration network (who collaborates with whom), and the decision points in the process. Using these maps, we identify key areas that will benefit from collaborative solutions – the quick wins that will drive business value in the short term.

We then design a social strategy and a project road map that demonstrates how to extend and leverage your collaborative ecosystem. We assist with the creation of business cases, which are unique to each client. We help you select the right collaborative platforms and assist through the implementation to make sure the benefits are accrued, measured and optimized.

For more information contact us.