Nine Steps to Improve Business Collaboration

By Hyoun Park Mar 23, 2011

Here are nine steps to help you improve collaboration processes in your organization.

In Part 1 of Aberdeen's posts, we discussed the business needs for collaboration to provide businesses with strategic guidance on how to use collaboration. Based on our most recent report on collaboration, Real-Time Collaboration: Innovate Your Business and Increase Revenue, we found that the top 20% of our respondents had the following performance in 2010:

24.5% increase in revenue in 2010
104% quantifiable Return on Investment (ROI) for a company's collaboration deployment
0.05 days (1 hour) to share critical information throughout a company

What did these organizations actually do differently compared to all other organizations? We studied the processes, organizational structure, knowledge and data management, performance and technology adoption trends of over 150 companies to find how these Best-in-Class organizations pursued collaboration in their enterprise.

Collaboration Revamped

Step 1: Identify an Executive Champion

Best-in-Class organizations were over twice as likely to have an executive champion to support an enterprise collaboration effort. As companies seek to drive an enterprise-wide collaborative effort that involves all employees, Best-in-Class organizations drive visibility to that effort through high-level executives who have cross-departmental responsibilities. However, this doesn’t mean that top-down management alone can ensure the success of a collaborative environment.

Step 2: Ignore the Executive Champion

Once executive visibility is gained, line-of-business employees have to take the reins. Employees shouldn’t ignore the message of an executive champion supporting collaboration, but they do need to internalize the message to the point that they are collaborating because it supports their own needs. In other words, employees need to believe in the collaborative effort for its own sake rather than be told to do so from a top-down approach.

Companies dependent on a top-down approach for using collaborative tools tend to see an initial uptake of usage, which is seen as success. However, this uptake quickly disappears if employees cannot equate these efforts with their own personal or departmental goals. Over 70% of Best-in-Class organizations work cohesively and organizationally between departments with no direct reporting relationship, compared to only 40% of all other companies (representing the bottom 80% of Aberdeen’s respondents).

Step 3: Optimize Internal Collaboration Processes

The processes associated with optimizing internal collaboration are centered around three different areas: applications, content creation and aligning collaborative activities to business goals. Best-in-Class organizations are more likely to focus on and formalize these activities compared to all other companies.

Step 4: Integrate Collaborative Tools with Enterprise Applications and Tools

On a more tactical and departmental level, work is often managed through enterprise applications ranging from Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) to Customer Relationship Management (CRM) to Business Process Management (BPM) tools. As Best-in-Class companies seek to optimize employee interaction with these management software tools, they integrate collaboration applications with other collaborative work tools.