|
|
By Kishore S. Swaminathan
Chief Scientist, Accenture
Much as the automobile was initially regarded as little more than a horseless carriage, today's collaboration technologies have usually been seen as mere enablers of electronic communication. However, recent developments in these technologies—and the ways in which people are beginning to use them—suggest that collaboration has evolved beyond its utilitarian stage
and is now poised to become a major
force in the corporate world.
|
|
|
Indeed, more and more companies are beginning to see collaboration technologies as "killer apps" they can harness to transform their companies and, ultimately, to power innovation.
Way back, we collaborated through face-to-face meetings, office memos, snail mail and informal conversations at the proverbial water cooler. Over the years, as the pace of business quickened and companies became more dispersed, various technologies—fax, e-mail, imaging, workflow, conference calls, videoconferencing—were introduced to support communication across a geographically distributed workforce.
But in each case, the technology simply "electronified" a well-understood, existing communication channel. In fact, experts often invoked a framework to describe collaboration technologies, suggesting that the Holy Grail in this realm was to achieve "telepresence" (see chart ). In other words, the goal was to replicate the effects of co-location and face-to-face interaction.
|
|
|
New ways of working
Today, we're starting to realize that the real promise of collaboration technologies lies in supporting new ways of working and interacting that simply were not possible or feasible through traditional means. That's a shift with huge implications for corporations.
Tactically, it means that by systematically introducing appropriate technologies to support collaborative processes, companies can improve communication among their knowledge workers while simultaneously reducing the overhead of reading and responding to e-mails. Strategically, the implications are far greater: With new collaboration technologies in place, companies are poised to dramatically improve their capacity for innovation.
To understand where collaboration technologies are headed, consider a very different framework that characterizes collaboration in terms of two new attributes. - Reach: an individual's ability to identify and effectively collaborate with the right people wherever they are (geographically and organizationally).
- Awareness: an individual's ability to maintain continuity of information flow with one's collaborators (see chart, above).
|
|
|
|
Corporate innovation
The combination of awareness and reach may be ideally suited for corporate innovation. In fact, several recent studies have found that a major stumbling block for innovation is poor communication across different organizational units within a company.¹
When employees' reach and awareness are enhanced, information flows faster and more frequently, which, in turn, means that across R&D, product development, strategy and marketing, promising ideas are aired and refined sooner—and less promising ones get culled faster. In addition, open collaboration restricts the power of negative "gatekeepers" or naysayers who may prematurely reject an idea or act as communication choke points across organizational units. (See "How to Capture the Essence of Innovation," Outlook, January 2008)
The result? Companies cultivate new and better ideas, and then bring them to market—or not—more quickly.
Although corporate adoption is in its early stages, emerging collaboration technologies may turn out to be the most potent tools companies can wield for managing their innovation capabilities. Or as John Seely Brown, the director of Xerox Corp.'s Palo Alto Research Center during its heyday, put it: "You can't manage invention . . . but you can manage innovation."
By Kishore S. Swaminathan
¹ Rob Cross et al., "Together We Innovate," Business Insight, Wall Street Journal Report, Sept. 15, 2007; Polly Rizova, "Are You Networked for Successful Innovation?" MIT Sloan Management Review, Spring 2006.
|
|
|
Kishore S. Swaminathan is Accenture's chief scientist and the global director of Accenture Technology Labs' systems integration research. He is responsible for defining the company's vision for the future of technology and setting its research and development agenda. Based in Chicago, Dr. Swaminathan has spent his Accenture career researching cutting-edge technologies. Winner of the 2000 Computerworld Smithsonian award for the best application of IT, Dr. Swaminathan has worked on more than a dozen research projects and has as many patents to his credit.
This article originally appeared in the January 2008 edition of Outlook, an Accenture publication. Copyright 2008 Accenture. All rights reserved. Excerpted and reprinted by permission.
|
|
|
|
|
