Why is Collaboration important?
Collaboration is an interesting concept. When I spoke to some senior management people previously, they think that collaboration is where people come to a room and discuss and work on something. Well I must say that they are not wrong, but in this new online world, collaboration can also done via the internet.
Collaboration is more than working on one document between 5 different people where they can edit this document together and changes are saved real time. Collaboration is more than a document manager where people can check in and check out documents. Collaboration is more than a Wiki where articles can be edited by anyone who has access to it and watch the article grow overtime. There is so much more to collaboration and let me talk more what are the benefits of collaboration:
1) Collaboration is about providing people a safe platform like ClearSpace in which they can retrieve their working documents, look for resources that have expertise in certain areas, use it as the breeding ground for new ideas and workplace/business process improvements.
During strategy planning times, a team of, say 10 senior executives, is responsible for making all strategic and corporate decisions in a unidirectional manner. Wouldn’t there be more brain power and “eyes” if everyone is involved in this strategic process? Clearly with such a large increase in people participation, there must be some levels of control, however this can be done for sure.
2) Collaboration can also be conducted outside of your organisation in two distinct areas – customers and suppliers/vendors.
For your customers, an organisation can engage them to gain customer loyalty and also gain their insight feedback and collaboratively build products and services that customers would want. This not only provide insights of your current clients in great depth but you can use the same platform to reach out to non-customers to ask them why they are not using your products or services. Never underestimate the power of such insights.
For your suppliers and vendors, a collaborative platform would allow them to work with you as one entity. This can streamline communication with your vendors / suppliers to gain a better and clearer understanding of the progress of work – real time (if not almost real time). With a better quality of data available, better decisions can be made for day to day operations thus potentially avoiding bigger mistakes down the track.
Organisations need to understand how collaboration can work for them and understand their corporate culture and working habits and use collaboration technologies wisely.
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