Collaboration is the magic buzz word of the decade. For those who have read my other articles,you should have a good understanding of some of the tools we can use, but Collaboration is not about the individual tools, it’s about the communications blueprint. It’s not about the hammer, it is about the house.
Normally, this is the prevue of the CIO, and this is what they get paid to do. However, the majority of the time the CIO is more the CSO (Chief Systems Officer) than they are the Chief Information Officer. They normally focus on the systems that information is stored on, and how it gets there and how it gets retrieved. In most cases, however, that data is only valuable if used by the right people and communicated to the correct teams. Normal processes stop short building in the communications aspect of data delivery. So let’s change the way we think about this process all together.
What we need is a Collaboration strategy. In a similar way that every business is now building BCPs (Business Continuity Plans) and DRPs (Disaster Recovery Plans) I believe they should be building Collaboration Plans. The Collaboration Plan should tie into every system, should identify process enhancement, business survivability, and data redundancy. The two things that most companies cannot survive without are voice communications and email. If done correctly these are key components of a Collaboration Strategy. To build a Collaboration strategy we need to follow a few simple rules.
Rule #1: Spend time with every business unit and department in your organization, and find out how they communicate. I did this in one of my customers who recently spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on new state of the art IP Handsets. After I spent some time reviewing their existing processes I realized the 47% of their staff never touched a handset. Of that 47%half of them were sales people who lived on their mobile phones. The other half communicated on a variety of non-sanctioned instant messaging clients. So why did they buy all of those phones? They were replacements for the previous system. No one took the time to build a plan, they just replaced the tool…
Rule #2: Determine what tools you have already purchased, THROUGHOUT the organization. In one of my federal clients we found over 150 different management tools with each having a 70% overlap in some fashion with at least 10 other products. There was not consolidated review before tools were purchased and with each change in personnel there was a change in preference with no guiding strategic document to control the tactical purchases.
Rule #3: Identify what additional technology you need to reduce the mean “time to decision” in each process identified in Rule #1 without changing the process and disrupting the end user culture. Take into account the findings in Rule #2 and identify what can be re-used and what needs to be scrapped.
Rule #4: Build a plan that spans 18-36 months with pre-planned technical reviews every 6-12-18 month markers. The largest cost to most Voice over IP phone systems today is the handsets. Two years ago vendors released tools like Mobile Communicators which ran on Mobile smartphones that supported 802.11 Wireless. You could actually have your office phone on your cell phone, which would alleviate the need for companies where 47% of the people only use their smartphones anyway. The problem was that two years ago few mobile phones had 802.11 built in, and the applications drained the batteries so fast the application was not practical. However, 24 months later…we have the iPhone,the Android, and dozens of phones that can connect to wireless networks and the batteries have been optimized for application use. We can build better plans for growth and save our customers much needed money.
Using these four rules, I have a 3 step process. First conduct a business review, Rule#1. Second, conduct a technical review,Rules 2 and 3. Finally, build your plan Rule #4. Of course, the devil is always in the details, and I know this is a very generic overview. I hope it will help you find a starting point and to understand that while sometimes the planning phase may seem like it will cost more than it is worth, it can provide you with long term savings. It can increase your productivity and it can increase your profits.
I recommend that you engage a paid consultant either from your integrator or use a third party. As a part of the integrator community, I can say with certainty that you will get what you pay for. If someone offers you free consulting to get your business, what you will get in return is a report from an automated tool that will attempt to justify your purchase of some individual tool or system. If you pay them to spend time with your people and ask them to be your honest broker then you will normally get the best person they have, because this is where their reputation is made or broken. Not in the free pre-sales effort.
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