Business in today’s world differs from several decades ago. Not only by the fact that almost all businesses use technologies to improve their work environments and increase their efficiency but also on how business is being conducted. A business today is not just a business serving their local customers with employees located in one office. Today’s business world is different. Large enterprises as well as small businesses take advantage of what technology can offer them and that is fast communication, interaction, collaboration as well as access to resources and customers which would not be possible without the help of various kinds of technology.
A look at businesses today
It is almost a standard that businesses are outsourcing part of their work to cheaper countries to maintain their competitive advantage in the financial as well as quality sector. Many businesses have offices not only across the country but also in different continents and spread all over the world. Employees are no longer working in offices, an advantage or disadvantage that mobile networking is offering. And all this is bringing businesses, business partners and customers closer, giving them more business advantages, more knowledge and improve efficiencies in areas that other companies might not have if they do not take advantages of collaboration and technology.
But how exactly do collaboration technologies works and how does it benefit the organization or business today? This paper will analyze the advantage of this new approach which is taking advantage of collaboration technologies, what is unique about them, how they can improve the existing business approaches and how they can bring businesses as well as organizations together to stay in business and successfully meet their business goals. Further during this analysis the paper will consider the downfalls businesses might encounter while using collaborative technologies as well what the cost and benefit analysis is.
Collaboration is Key
In the new global economy, a company’s competitive edge is intrinsically tied to the ability to quickly collaborate with co-workers, partners and customers. Business communication has reached new levels in complexity. Team dynamics have evolved from localized groups in one building into dispersed groups. But the need to interact on a moment’s notice remains a constant. As a result, collaboration software and systems emerged as a key component in today’s arsenal of communications tools. These collaboration technologies or software were designed to help people involved in a common task achieve their goals at a fast pace, more efficient and with resources available to complete the task successfully. Collaborative software is considered to be the basis for computer supported cooperative work. Software systems as email, calendaring, text chat, wiki belong in this category. It has been suggested that Metcalfe’s law — the more people who use something, the more valuable it becomes — applies to such collaboration tools and technologies (Wikipedia, 2007).
Collaboration and Technology
For a system to be identified as a collaboration tool, it needs to be identified what the primary ways in which humans interact are and these can be put into three categories: conversations, transactions, and collaborations. The conversation category provides an exchange of information between two or more participants where the primary purpose of the interaction is discovery or relationship building. Communication technology such as telephones, instant messaging, and e-mail are generally sufficient for conversational interactions. Transactional interaction involves the exchange of transaction entities where a major function of the transaction entity is to alter the relationship between participants. An example is if one participant exchanges money for goods and becomes a customer.
The last category is collaborative interactions and the main function of the participant’s relationship is to alter a collaboration entity. Examples for these collaborative interactions can be the development of an idea, the creation of a design or the achievement of a shared goal. Therefore, real collaboration technologies deliver the functionality for many participants to augment a common deliverable. This collaborative function within a system records documents management, threaded discussions, audit history, and other mechanisms designed to capture the efforts of many into a managed content environment. These kinds of interactions can be in the form of forums, software solutions and different technologies which are considered to be on a unified electronic platform that supports synchronous and asynchronous communication through a variety of devices and channels (Wikipedia, 2007).
Improve business processes with collaborative technologies
These collaborative technologies are changing the way people interact in business, how business processes are improved and therefore costs are minimized as well as knowledge is exchanged between different parties which again leads to new innovations, improved services, customer interactions and therefore a much higher competitive advantage as well as improved overall business successes. Already, collaborative technology has enabled productivity increases, but the true transformational changes will be evolutionary from today’s contextual collaborative through the year 2020, when a variety of social factors combine with technology. Among these social factors are today’s youth, who are raised on SMS, text messaging, IM and chat. Once they join the workforce, collaboration will increase dramatically. There will be new ideas, innovation and emerging approaches on how to improve collaboration across states, countries and, continents. In the long run this will lead to a more improved and experience collaboration society, taking the fullest advantages of this new but constantly growing technology.
Businesses that already started implementing these technologies see the advantages collaboration technology brings with it. One of the most significant trends in the collaboration space demonstrates clear innovation: facilitating interactions that accelerate the development, sales and delivery of products and services to end users and business partners. The most innovative companies have made the leap from using collaboration technology for individual improvement to using it for business process acceleration as well as innovation (Dede, 2002).
Strategic innovation
Today, innovation plays an increasingly critical role in the competitive global market. Strategic innovations are the processes through which a company develops and introduces new ideas, goods, services, and practices. Accelerating the pace of strategic innovation has become a key business objective, and the use of advanced collaboration technologies has the potential to become a business “game changer.” Many first-generation collaboration technology implementations did not bring the expected results that businesses had hoped for because these tools could only support internal collaboration and were challenged to accommodate working with external parties.
Over the past few years, several new collaboration tools have emerged that were designed specifically to support innovation: blog and wikis emerged. Many businesses started using blogs both internally and externally as an important communication channel, information exchange and educational tool. The use of wikis has contributed a lot to innovation and information flow as they allow innovators to collaborate in forming the content of a Web site. A wiki Web site operates on a principle of collaborative trust, rather than central control — any user can edit site content, including other users’ contributions. Wikis are also a very simple to use tool, which allows interaction and data input from almost anyone who can use a computer and wants to share their information on a special topics (Oldham, 2005).
Social networking as a collaboration tool
Social networking is another tool that is an indirect part of collaboration technologies. Innovators use social networks to collaborate with knowledgeable coworkers and to use tools to map the flow of information through an organization and to locate those knowledgeable coworkers. An organization chart usually does not reflect how knowledge actually flows through a company but social network analysis provides that and helps companies to understand how knowledge flows through an organization, and thus improve upon this exchange. Many leading companies are using social networking tools, such as expert locator systems, to find experts on specific topics. (Petrassi, and Whitaker, 2007).
But not only do collaboration technologies provide innovation they also do accelerate and improve business processes as well as create competitive advantages. Innovative CIOs look at collaboration from a perspective which includes asking the question of how people are working, what they are doing, and how technology can support that process. This can be used to improve the sales process by facilitating the complex interactions between sales teams and their prospects. This may involve product demonstrations, negotiations and implementation planning.
Businesses that have identified on how to enhance and expedite that interaction achieve a compelling advantage over businesses without taking advantage of these tools. By using this technology businesses enable and support collaboration among various departments and offices without having to travel around the world. But not only do collaborative technologies support internal communication and innovation, but in the same way they do support communication with cooperation partners, suppliers and development teams as well as outsourcing partners. This represents the most fundamental shift in the collaborative space and companies that have survived and thrived in the changing global economy have maximized their leverage across corporate boundaries (Gartner Inc., 2005).
Businesses of all sizes can benefit
One of the main advantages that this technology offers is the fact that it can not only be used by large Fortune 500 companies but also multinational small and midsize businesses. Historically, interaction with distributors in other countries and manufacturers in Asia and other external audiences was restricted to the telephone, field visits that many small businesses could not afford. Now even the smallest business interested in international business, improving corporate efficiency, exchange knowledge, promote innovation and gain competitive advantage can interact with external audiences for a fraction of the cost, and a fraction of the time required for field visits. Studies have shown that companies use collaborative technology to interact with key external audiences such as customers/clients (72%), vendors and suppliers (41%), and peers in the industry (37%). (CIO, (2007).
Although many companies see advantages in the improvement of their competitive advantage, strategic alliance, improved business opportunities, reduces costs as well as more efficient work processes, critics argue that collaboration technologies can also bring disadvantages that can be higher than the advantages the technologies will bring. On the technological side, e-partnership and virtual organization take the lead in the current Internet-driven business environment that assimilates the most advanced electronic technologies and the knowledge-based economy. Companies involved in e-partnerships must participate in external business relationships by technology interactions. This is a great challenge confronting e-partners to re-engineer their IT strategies and resources and re-think their ways of communication and doing business with e-partners. The main issues to be considered are IT infrastructure and managers and operatives knowledge and skills associated with e-business and e-commerce.
Caveat emptor
But also consider the non-technical side – the human resource side. The biggest potential challenges to management are conflict in different organizational differences, country cultures, taxation, financial and commercial risks, legal risks concerning online intellectual property, national and international online trade and law. These issues come in place when collaborations are considered to be mechanisms to gain access to politically-sensitive areas such as geographical regions under military control or various intelligence – commercial, military or political. Collaborative projects may encourage the brain drain, especially if researchers from scientifically weaker countries leave to join the main research team once a project ends. Sometimes an element of exploitation exists with a collaborative arrangement, particularly when involved with partners of unequal strengths. The stronger partner, for example, may design the project, analyze the results, and take the lead in publishing the results, using the weaker partner merely as a research assistant to collect data (Oldham, 2005).
Other challenges
Compounded with the cultural challenges such as shared assumption, beliefs, values and norms as well as legal, political and economic differences among countries, consider other risks factors when facing e-partnerships and virtual organizations while using collaboration tools. These risks can be information technology risks as well as financial and commercial risks. While the Internet and network organizations facilitate improved communication of data, information and knowledge, they give rise to issues and problems of privacy, data security and intellectual property protection. The information database created through Internet transactions may lead to legal disputes among e-partnerships over ownership and possible loss of the potential profit generated. Moreover, electronic research projects usually involve new technologies and innovative development, which creates a high level of technological and commercial risk for every organization involved. However, it is the motivation of sharing and minimizing the risks that entail using collaboration technologies for e-partnering and e-alliance.
Collaboration tool impact
Collaboration is a key driver of overall performance of companies around the world. Its impact is more significant as a company’s aggressiveness in pursuing new market opportunities and more significant as the external market environment. It is an interaction between culture and technology enhancing information sharing and bringing many advantages to all parties involved. But it is also a fine line between exploitation, intellectual property breaches and national security. Just as many new innovations, technologies and strategies, collaboration tools will improve a businesses competitive advantage by increasing sales, improvident work processes, taking advantage of untapped resources while increasing customer service. At the same time, if not used properly used and without a well-planned strategy and the right partners, collaboration tools can mean the end of a successful business.
