One of the greatest challenges in the workplace is getting people to work together productively. While this sounds simple, it is most assuredly not. When new countries and markets are brought into the picture, the complexity increases in geometric proportion. Technology plays a critical role in facilitating communication and collaboration, but the challenge is for companies to find the right set of technology platforms and organisational guidelines to enable the business to work most effectively.
In order for companies to be successful in the knowledge economy, given the challenges of today’s work environment, it is necessary to change the rules.
Exactly two years ago, on 1 May 2004, the European Union expanded eastward, shifting from a tight-knit club-like association of 15 countries, centred around France and Germany, to an assemblage of 25 countries representing 455 million people whose outlook on many issues, including wealth and business, varies greatly.
To say that all 25 countries have concerns about the future is an understatement. Many of the existing countries’ citizenry, already facing economic stagnation, continue to worry about unemployment, immigration and national identity.
Citizens in the new member countries are concerned about economic inequities that still exist between member countries, such as wealthier countries not permitting citizens from new member countries to work within their borders for the first few years. The EU has always had disparities of wealth and resources; to correct them, it has over a period of decades transferred wealth from richer countries, such as Germany and Luxembourg, to poorer ones, such as Greece, Portugal and Ireland. But never before has the EU seen the likes of the economic malaise found in the east, from rural Poland to the Baltic countryside, within its borders.
As the EU expands its borders in a quest for prosperity and power, hundreds of thousands of people may find themselves not invited to the party, their situation a result of decades of Communist-ruled state control and command economies. During the industrial age, output, rather than outcome, was a key measure of success. Today, economies are increasingly based on knowledge, although we still manage them as if we were in a purely industrial economy. Although finding a better way of doing things has always been a virtual guarantee of long-term growth and success; what is different in the information age is that a growing portion of production is now in the form of intangibles. This can be referred to as the weightless economy, which consists of three elements:
1. Information and communications technologies such as the internet.
2. Intellectual property, ranging from patents and trademarks to consulting and professional services.
3. Information stores such as libraries and online databases, both online and off.
In contrast to the more established states in the EU, where a weightless economy has taken hold, the economies in the newer states are not nearly as far along. The percentage of knowledge workers in the general population in the EU has been estimated to be between 30 and 50 percent (this depends on whom one counts as a knowledge worker, which is a subject beyond the scope of this text). In the new states, the percentage of knowledge workers is between five and 10 percent.
The concept of a global information economy is frequently discussed, but the need for a highly educated workforce is an unavoidable consequence of such a dream.
For many companies, the trend has been to “think global” and 10 additional countries now joined with the EU creates an opportunity for many companies to build new markets and create jobs in the new member countries.
May 1, 2004 brought two questions to the forefront:
1. How will these new knowledge workers collaborate with their colleagues?
2. How will the companies collaborate with their customers and suppliers?
The answer is far from clear. One way to bring knowledge workers together is through a Collaborative Business Environment (CBE). Collaborative Business Environments offer organisations a single work environment for the knowledge worker that supersedes the traditional desktop metaphor.
Using a common interface, CBEs provide access to all necessary applications from one (easy-to-use) place.
• CBEs bring people together – both synchronously and asynchronously – allowing the enterprise to run on “21st century time”.
• CBEs increase productivity by providing access to, and delivering, information and knowledge when and where it is needed.
• Key business indicators are always available – dashboard style – which ensures that managers will not miss critical information.
• CBEs enable knowledge workers to locate information, knowledge and human resources (experts) immediately.
• CBEs reduce reaction time, while ensuring that fewer opportunities are missed and more are exploited.
Collaborative Business Environments can provide the infrastructure for cross-border enterprise-wide communication, collaboration and knowledge sharing. Deploying a Collaborative Business Environment will improve collaboration, help facilitate enterprise-wide productivity gains and streamline the flow of information.
An excellent example of how the Collaborative Business Environment model works in practice is a team of consultants, one in San Francisco, one in Tokyo and several at a client site in Budapest. During the course of the engagement, despite the difference in local time, they use a Collaborative Business Environment to prepare documents relating to the engagement, working in a coordinated, but asynchronous manner. They can also meet in real time in the CBE from time to time, and all participants in the meeting have access to the same resources. The CBE allows the consultants to focus on their client while tapping expertise from consultants on other continents.
Of course, CBEs are not limited to getting small groups of people to work together; they provide the infrastructure that enables different areas of a company – as well as the company’s customers and partners – to work together.
Today, in most companies, despite great technological advances, the flow of information is often one way, and of limited value. With current systems, valuable information and knowledge are all too often lost, or frequently go unrecognised and unused.
In order for companies to take advantage of expanded and expanding borders, they need to find the optimal path to enterprise-wide Collaborative Business Environments (CBEs), which serve as the nexus of knowledge sharing, collaboration and the business itself. Companies that build solid and well-structured CBEs will leverage their people and knowledge – across time zones and borders – while creating environments that facilitate the ability of people to work more effectively.
Unfortunately, it’s not that simple to go out and buy a Collaborative Business Environment today, for several reasons. First, managers in most organisations don’t understand what is required of them in the knowledge economy; for them it’s business as usual. Second, the existing infrastructure at most companies suffers from ‘technology sprawl’ – a situation where companies have multiple applications that accomplish the very same thing (e.g. four or five content management systems, multiple non-federated search systems, etc.).
It is essential for managers to understand the various adjacent business dependencies and overlapping functionality among these areas. For example, the line where content management starts and document management leaves off is nothing less than a moving target. However, many managers fail to recognise this and, as a result, companies over invest in redundant technologies. With sufficient knowledge at hand, managers can avoid this trap while at the same time striving to build true Collaborative Business Environments that engender a high level of knowledge sharing and collaboration within their organisations. The best Collaborative Business Environments satisfy the following three criteria:
The one environment rule
The greater the extent to which users can remain in one over-arching environment for all aspects of knowledge work, the greater the likelihood is that the environment or application will be successful. Conversely, the more times users are required to open other applications outside the one environment, the greater the likelihood of lost knowledge or productivity.
Friction-free knowledge sharing
Many knowledge and document management tools required users to classify documents and save them to the system. Friction-free knowledge sharing (FFKS) implies an environment where users simply go about their work, such as authoring or editing a document, and the system takes care of the rest. Currently, too many users store critical documents only on their local hard drive because knowledge sharing is just too cumbersome.
Embedded community
Embedded community means deploying community and collaboration tools, such as email, instant messaging, presence and awareness, within Collaborative Business Environments in a contextual manner. In short, it means bringing these tools deep into environments where knowledge workers perform their tasks, linking knowledge work and collaboration, and knowledge workers with each other.
For managers that do recognise the possibilities of the Collaborative Business Environment model for their organisation, the marketplace holds many possibilities. Many offerings have the potential to reduce the inevitable inefficiencies that arise when people interact with others. Soon, with technology advances such as real-time communications, web services, on demand computing, service oriented architectures, and powerful Collaborative Business Environments, information will flow to where it is needed, precisely when it is needed. Theoretically, the long sought-after productivity gains will finally be realized in enterprise-wide efficiencies, and everyone in an organisation will have access to critical information when it is most useful.
The deployment of a Collaborative Business Environment is not a simple matter, especially if it must traverse continents, multiple languages and multiple cultures. Given the resources that such implementations require, such as infrastructure, people and funding, as well as the amount of time that the implementation will take, such as planning, deployment and training, it is essential to choose a system based on a measure of its impact on the knowledge workers who will use it. It is also important to understand the different classes of Collaborative Business Knowledge applications and services.
Although a Collaborative Business Environment can have a positive impact on an organisation with as few as 10 people, the benefits of a CBE become even more apparent when deployed in companies that are integrating new territories into their organisation, such as an expansion to new markets within new member states in the EU.
Although new offices are usually seeded with long-time employees, the learning curve for new employees in the new regions can be considerably shortened by essentially giving them access to everything that a company knows.
Collaborative Business Environments do, in fact, change the rules. They maximise the potential for appropriate levels of interaction, both within the enterprise and between a company and its suppliers, customers and partners. They create a real-time environment where asynchronous activities, such as voice mail and email messages, can move to the background because workers are able to initiate synchronous, or real-time activities easily.
CBEs have the potential to finally realise long-sought enterprise productivity gains. No longer need one wait days for feedback from a colleague who is away on holiday. No longer must workers settle for help from a colleague lacking suitable expertise when the most knowledgeable person could be located just as easily, even if that person is 6,000 miles away.