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Can collaboration really impact business performance in some sort of a meaningful way? All signs point to yes.
If you're in the collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, knowledge management space, then you should be aware of a few reports that Frost & Sullivan have published on the business impact of collaboration. The first report was based on a study conducted in 2006 and the second report was based on a study conducted in 2009. Both reports conclude that collaboration does have a significant effect on business performance. While I'm not going to cover the methodology here, what I will cover are the findings of the reports. Before reading, please keep in mind that these reports were sponsored by Cisco, Microsoft and Verizon.
Collaboration and Business Performance
So does collaboration really impact business performance? Yes!
Based on the findings from the first report, collaboration impacts virtually every aspect of business, more so than both a company's strategy orientation and market turbulence.
We can see from the chart that collaboration has an enormous effect not just on overall performance but on profitability, innovation and even customer satisfaction. Now, while this report was conducted in 2006 the 2009 findings also corroborate this.
I should point that Frost & Sullivan took a slightly different approach to their most recent report, ranking organizations as being either basic, intermediate or advanced collaborators (this wasn't done in the 2006 report).
So again we can see that the more collaboratively advanced an organization is, the greater the ROC or Return on Collaboration (the formula for this can be found in the second report mentioned above). Notice that basic and intermediate collaborators don't have that big of a gap between them, however advanced collaborators seem to have a much greater return than both intermediate and basic collaborators. The characteristics used to measure the level of collaboration within the enterprise can be seen below.
The Missing Software
For those of you in the Enterprise 2.0/collaboration space you will notice a huge missing section on collaboration tools. There is no mention of intranets, wikis, internal social networks or anything of the like included anywhere in the report. In my opinion this is not only an oversight but a factor that really throws a wrench in the whole report (and this was from the 2009 report).
Perhaps this is the just the downside of having organizations such Cisco and Verizon sponsor reports — the report is skewed towards products and services that they offer. These Enterprise 2.0 tools are becoming a huge factor and characteristic of effective collaboration and should have been included in the report.
The Individual's Collaboration Needs
Although collaboration is important, the individual needs of employees are just as important. Based on the first report, the 5 key individual collaboration needs met are:
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