I am inviting you to make a shift in your world view this year around collaboration. I am asking you to look the processes you’re involved with from a new perspective. Start with a basic question: “What if I had the ability to interact with anyone I wanted whenever I wanted to or could find information whenever I needed it?” What would this do for you or for your business?
Elearning! Magazine had an interesting article recently on this exact topic. Shifts are mostly about behaviors and making changes to them, which as we all know is very difficult. What behaviors do you have that you would like to change? Stop smoking, lose some weight, exercise more – you get the idea – changing behavior is hard. For collaboration to be successful the shift has to happen early; it has to happen through a change in the way people view the world, their business, and themselves. Many of us still think and work sequentially (think silos) but with advancements in technology we are able to create collaborative clouds, now I know as soon as I mentioned “clouds” many of you rolled your eyes and dismissed reading the rest of this blog. And believe me, I know eye-rolling when I see it – I have a 13 year old, but hear me out – what if I asked you what is faster – Sequential or simultaneous? What if you could have more visibility, what if decisions were made in public areas where you could get earlier buy-in or acceptance? Would you be interested in improving communications and shortening cycle times?
Now that you see a few benefits from making a shift from old processes to new or from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0, how do you make the shift to collaboration? In reality, this is more of an organizational development problem than a technology problem. Most of us have the technology or could easily get it. The first step to collaboration is to simultaneously look at people, processes and technology. So, let’s start with a few key areas –
- Do an assessment of your current environment
- Are you set up to take advantage of the current technologies
- Are you able to start at the basic training level
- Are you able to build collaborative communities for learning, projects, business intelligence, sales and operational planning, etc
- And most importantly are you able to integrate all of these practices into a cohesive whole?
- Do you want to know more about bringing collaboration into your organization? How you can mix the formal and the informal?