Collaboration Tools – A Strategic Approach to Drive Business Value

We’ve seen an explosion in the use of social networking by individuals in their role as consumers. However, many organizations are just starting to address employee collaboration at work. Many organizations that have started this journey are struggling to drive adoption of the collaboration tools or measure the business value that they create.  This is often because they haven’t developed specific goals for enterprise collaboration.

Most people can readily see that asking questions within a community of experts or instant messaging with another employee provides value by helping get them the answers they need faster.  However, many organizations are looking to develop more rigorous metrics around collaboration to justify ongoing investments in collaboration technology and the manpower needed to facilitate communities and to harvest and manage the content that accrues from collaboration.

Where we’ve seen the best examples of organizations driving business value from collaboration tools are not from “one size fits all” or “build it and they will come” approaches. Rather, leading organizations are targeting and promoting collaboration to specific workforces within the organization. Enterprise-level standards for collaboration tools and processes are established, but they are configured to meet the needs of specific workforces. And those workforces are coached on how to use the collaboration tools in their daily work.  This is what we call Work Redesigned and it focuses on the end-user to realize business results.

For example, consider the telecommunications industry where a big business driver is customer retention.  We’ve seen significant business value created by enabling customer service representatives to quickly access frequently asked questions, update answers when incomplete, IM with supervisors during the course of a call and post questions to experts to get answers for customer call backs.  One telecommunications industry customers was able to demonstrate a 23% decrease in average call handling time, while at the same time drive a 15% increase in customer satisfaction. That translated into millions of dollars of business value.

Contrast this with the pharmaceutical industry where the big business driver is innovation and how to discover the next blockbuster drug in order to get it to market faster. We’ve seen real business value created by enabling scientists to follow colleagues and projects that are aligned with the projects they are working on, so they can collaborate and build on what has already been learned rather than reinventing the wheel. One pharmaceutical company identified over $1.5 million in savings in the first six months of a pilot with a small subset of its scientists. They then deployed it to the entire R&D workforce and saw significant acceleration of their time-to-market for new products.

These are just two examples from the many organizations we’ve worked with that are driving demonstrable value from collaboration tools.  The key lessons learned in helping organizations achieve these sorts of results include:

• Starting with the organization’s business strategy and determining where collaboration can best enable that strategy
• Targeting the organization’s mission critical workforces and configuring the collaboration approach to the way they work
• Treating collaboration as a behavioral change initiative and not just a technology initiative

Organizations who take this approach are truly realizing the benefits that these new collaboration tools can provide and maximizing their return on investment. You can learn more from Avanade’s global survey on collaboration.