Defining Collaboration Strategy - A Framework

Collaboration tools offer a wide range of benefits to enterprises, right from cost reductions to increased productivity / innovation as well as knowledge consolidation. However, realizing these benefits is easier said than done. Often, firms who have deployed collaboration solutions in the past have failed to get the expected ROI. The main reason – Absence of a clear strategy!

To derive value from their investments, companies must look at collaboration as more than just a technology deployment or having the "right" tools in place. Rather, It’s about creating a culture and defining the way an organization should function.

Let’s assume you are planning a road trip with your family to a destination you have never been before. Do you simply pack and hit the road? Or do you carefully plan the key elements of your journey like the best route, boarding and lodging arrangements, starting time, etc? For most of us, I think it will be the latter.

On a similar note, collaboration is like a journey and a comprehensive strategy is a critical component of any collaboration programme which can help maximize the benefits out of your investments. The following approach provides you with a framework to define a sound strategy for your initiative:

As-Is State (The Point of Origin)

• Analyze your Organization Culture / Degree of Openness – As a first step, you should understand the key tenets of your organizational culture. Is your organization Flat or Hierarchal? How freely do communications happen in your organization? Is the collaboration internal, external, global or business line focused? How open are people to embrace change?
• Identify the Collaboration Patterns – Know the types of communications that happen, the key processes and stakeholders involved as well as the frequency of these communications. Communications can be synchronous (real-time) or asynchronous (offline) and your strategy should address both these types.
• Assess your Collaboration Maturity Level – What kind of tools currently exist in your organization (e.g. Video Conferencing, Emails, etc), how effective are they and what are the gaps / challenges in the current set up.

To-Be State (The Destination)

• Aligns with Corporate Vision – Every organization has a vision and it is important for your collaboration strategy to complement it. For e.g., if you want to be a ‘Customer First’ organization, your strategy should stress on how your collaboration solution will ultimately help achieve better service for customers.
• Meets Business Goals / Objectives – Be absolutely clear on what you want to achieve out of your collaboration initiative. Merely stating high level goals is not enough; you need to specify both short term and long term goals with defined targets.
• Performance Metrics – Define some metrics to judge the performance of your programme and check if it is on track. As an example, A business goal could be to ‘Foster Innovation’ within the company and the metric to measure it could be “Number of new ideas generated’.

Strategic Roadmap (The Journey)

• Product Selection – For a collaboration strategy to be successful, choosing a technology which meets your requirements is very important. Rather than falling for a tool that ‘Gives it All’, opt for a tool which fits your needs better. Read one of my earlier blog on this topic for more details.
• Architecture and Functional Guidelines – Building collaboration architecture touches all key aspects of an enterprise from its people to technology including hosting models, integration requirements, etc. It helps to visualize how your solution will fit in the existing technology landscape. Additionally, depending on your existing processes and business imperatives, you need to specify functional guidelines like system accesses / rights, security aspects like session timeouts, etc. 
• Implementation Plan – A detailed plan defining the key steps, timelines, owners and dependencies helps to track the progress of your collaboration initiative as well as provides a focus on the features planned to be implemented. 
• Use Cases – Defining sample use cases will answer the question ‘How will the technology ultimately align with my processes to fulfill the needs?’ For eg, you can create a use case workflow showing how your social collaboration tool can be used to generate new ideas. 
• Adoption Strategy – Merely deploying a strategy is not enough. Your stakeholders need to embrace it for you to gain the desired results. Choose the best way to deploy your solution – Big Bang, Viral or Phased Approach. Each approach has its pros and cons and you need to carefully consider which one will work best with your users. Adoption mechanisms (like Rewards & Incentives, Mobile Apps, etc) can improve usage of the collaboration system once it gets deployed.  
• Marketing & Awarness Strategy – Devise marketing strategies (emails, blogs, etc) to create awareness among end users about the product, the Go-Live dates and How it can benefit the users. 
• Training and Enablement – Plan system walkthroughs to familiarize end users with the collaboration solution and its key features. Creating Help files, Introduction videos and FAQ documents could be good resources for users to refer in case they get stuck somewhere. 
• Risk Identification – Identify key risks and their mitigation strategies to ensure a smooth Governance.

Key Points to be kept in mind

• At the start of the initiative, have a mechanism (like surveys) to capture the pain points from your stakeholders perspective
• Buy-in from Senior Management is critical. For your initiative to become successful, the drive needs to come from the TOP. 
• Introducing New Social Tools does not mean that you need to do away with Traditional Collaboration Tools like Emails. You can pair both the technologies to address your gaps better.
• Social is entering organizations through a variety of tools. Most content management systems like Sharepoint, Adobe CQ, etc have started incorporating social features in their new releases. It is important to ensure your business stakeholders don’t get confused and know the purpose of each system clearly.
• Review the performance of your collaboration programme on a regular basis and re-work your strategy, if required.

“Unity is strength... when there is teamwork and collaboration, wonderful things can be achieved.” — Mattie Stepanek