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In the age of Web 2.0, Internet users are rewriting the rules of social interaction by harnessing a range of new technologies to create and sustain virtual communities forged around common interests. Communications channels such as blogs and online forums, amplified by collaborative technologies like social bookmarking, provide powerful tools for sharing information and sustaining relationships across geographic borders and industry silos. Often referred to as collective intelligence or the wisdom of the crowd, the reservoir of knowledge created by these confederations of self-designated experts and volunteers can often exceed the sum of the parts.
It is the power inherent in this collective intelligence that is causing the corporate world to sit up and take notice. In today’s global market environment, it is increasingly difficult to differentiate products via conventional benchmarks like price or even quality. One key to gaining a competitive advantage is being the first to market. This often requires rethinking the enterprise from the ground up, from technologies to processes to people. As part of this business transformation, business leaders are now focused on the human component in their efforts to foster innovation and growth. To truly stand out from the crowd, they are discovering they must harness the power of corporate knowl-edge. By collecting, maintaining and sharing the discrete bits of knowledge scattered throughout departments and organizational niches, companies can better leverage this collective intelligence within the enterprise.
Social software can be instrumental in achieving this goal. A recent research paper by Gartner concluded, “Enterprise social software will be the biggest new workplace technology success story of this decade. Thirty percent of enterprises will openly sponsor internal…social sharing spaces to help employees find others with similar interest, skills, backgrounds and experiences.”
In a 2006 study, more than 700 CEOs worldwide told IBM that finding new areas of growth, new products and services, and engineering new in-house processes and business models were ranked as top strategies for staying competitive. When asked where the ideas that could lead to such innovation would come from, CEO identified employees, partners and clients as the top three groups.
In the same study, the ability to collaborate was identified as a key competitive factor that separates out-performers from under-performers in terms of their ability to innovate.
Regardless of the type of innovation undertaken, over 75 percent of CEOs indicated that collaboration is very important to innovation. One CEO described its importance on a scale of one to five as “enormous. I’d give this a six if I could.”
But when it comes to assessing the current situation, CEOs experienced disappointment in fostering a collaborative workplace.
Although collaborative aspirations were high, actual implementation was dramatically lower. Only half of the CEOs we spoke with believed their organizations were collaborating beyond a moderate level.
Business leaders today are looking for ways to create a culture where collaboration across corporate boundaries is a fundamental part of the corporate structure. They recognize the need to create a collegial environment within the organization where teaming efforts are valued. Additionally, business leaders know that innovative ideas can also germinate through collaborative relationships with customers and business partners.
As senior executives, CIOs have an important role to play in helping make collaboration an integral part of the company’s business strategy and in enabling collaboration for both people and systems. Emerging collaborative technologies can enable companies to bring skill and scale together at unprecedented levels. CIOs can lead the implementation of these collaborative technologies, both within the IT organization and across the enterprise, working with business leaders to remove organizational inhibitors to collaboration.
Social software: taking collaboration to the next level
While traditional collaborative software has facilitated group projects and team-work for many years, the new generation of social networking tools can amplify these existing capabilities significantly. Knowledge workers are finding business value in discovering and drawing upon relationships beyond their immediate teams. Social software tools can help people locate and link up with an extended network of subject matter experts—providing a fresh, innovative approach toward solving problems and meeting new challenges in the marketplace.
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