Systems collaboration and social business

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With all these systems and information, you might wonder how is it possible to make sense of them? How do people working in firms pull it all together, work towards common goals, and coordinate plans and actions? Information systems can’t make decisions, hire or fire people, sign contracts, agree on deals, or adjust the price of goods to the marketplace. In addition to the types of systems we have just described, businesses need special systems to support collaboration   and teamwork

WHAT IS COLLABORATION?
Collaboration is working with others to achieve shared and explicit goals. Collaboration focuses on task or mission accomplishment and usually takes place in a business, or other organization, and between businesses. You collaborate with a colleague in Tokyo having expertise on a topic about which you know nothing. You collaborate with many colleagues in publishing a company blog. If you’re in a law firm, you collaborate with accountants in an accounting firm in servicing the needs of a client with tax problems. Collaboration can be short-lived, lasting a few minutes, or longer term, depending on the nature of the task and the relationship among participants. Collaboration can be one-to-one or many-to-many.

Employees may collaborate in informal groups that are not a formal part of the business firm’s organizational structure or they may be organized into formal teams. Teams have a specific mission that someone in the business assigned to them. Team members need to collaborate on the accomplishment of specific tasks and collectively achieve the team mission. The team mission might be to “win the game,” or “increase online sales by 10 percent.” Teams are often short-lived, depending on the problems they tackle and the length of time needed to find a solution and accomplish the mission. Collaboration and teamwork are more important today than ever for a variety of reasons.

• Changing nature of work. The nature of work has changed from factory manufacturing and pre-computer office work where each stage in the production process occurred independently of one another, and was coordinated by supervisors. Work was organized into silos. Within a silo, work passed from one machine tool station to another, from one desktop to another, until the finished product was completed. Today, jobs require much closer coordination and interaction among the parties involved in producing the service or product. A recent report from the consulting firm McKinsey & Company argued that 41 percent of the U.S. labor force is now composed of jobs where interaction (talking, e-mailing, presenting, and persuading) is the primary value-adding activity. Even in factories, workers today often work in production groups, or pods
•  Growth of professional work. “Interaction” jobs tend to be professional jobs in the service sector that require close coordination and collaboration. Professional jobs require substantial education, and the sharing of information and opinions to get work done. Each actor on the job brings specialized expertise to the problem, and all the actors need to take oneanother into account in order to accomplish the job.
• Changing organization of the firm. For most of the industrial age, managers organized work in a hierarchical fashion. Orders came down the hierarchy, and responses moved back up the hierarchy. Today, work is organized into groups and teams, and the members are expected to develop their own methods for accomplishing the task. Senior managers observe and measure results, but are much less likely to issue detailed orders or operating procedures. In part, this is because expertise and decision-making power have been pushed down in organization
•  Changing scope of the firm. The work of the firm has changed from a single location to multiple locations offices or factories throughout a region, a nation, or even around the globe. For instance, Henry Ford developed the first mass-production automobile plant at a single Dearborn, Michigan factory. In 2012, Ford employed over 166,000 people at around 90 plants and facilities worldwide. With this kind of global presence, the need for close coordination of design, production,marketing, distribution, and service obviously takes on new importance and scale. Large global companies need to have teams working on a global basis
•  Emphasis on innovation. Although we tend to attribute innovations in business and science to great individuals, these great individuals are most likely working with a team of brilliant colleagues. Think of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs (founders of Microsoft and Apple), both of whom are highly regarded innovators, and both of whom built strong collaborative teams to nurture and support innovation in their firms. Their initial innovations derived from close collaboration with colleagues and partners. Innovation, in other words, is a group and social process, and most innovations derive from collaboration among individuals in a lab, a business, or government agencies. Strong collaborative practices and technologies are believed to increase the rate and quality of innovation.
•  Changing culture of work and business. Most research on collaboration supports the notion that diverse teams produce better outputs, faster, than individuals working on their own. Popular notions of the crowd (“crowdsourcing,” and the “wisdom of crowds”) also provide cultural support for collaboration and teamwork.

WHAT IS SOCIAL BUSINESS?
Many firms today enhance collaboration by embracing social business the use of social networking platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, and internal corporate social tools to engage their employees, customers, and suppliers. These tools enable workers to set up profiles, form groups, and “follow” each other’s status updates. The goal of social business is to deepen interactions with groups inside and outside the firm to expedite and enhance informationsharing, innovation, and decision making. A key word in social business is “conversations.” Customers, suppliers, employees, managers, and even oversight agencies continually have conversations about firms, often without the knowledge of the firm or its key actors (employees and managers).

Supporters of social business argue that, if firms could tune into these conversations, they would strengthen their bonds with consumers, suppliers, and employees, increasing their emotional involvement in the firm. All of this requires a great deal of information transparency. People need to share opinions and facts with others quite directly, without intervention from executives or others. Employees get to know directly what customers and other employees think; suppliers will learn very directly the opinions of supply chain partners; and even managers presumably will learn more directly from their employees how well they are doing. Nearly everyone involved in the creation of value will know much more about everyone else.

If such an environment could be created, it is likely to drive operational efficiencies, spur innovation, and accelerate decision making. If product designers can learn directly about how their products are doing in the market in real time, based on consumer feedback, they can speed up the redesign process. If employees can use social connections inside and outside the company to capture new knowledge and insights, they will be able to work more efficiently and solve more business problems. Table 2.2 describes important applications of social business inside and outside the firm.

BUSINESS BENEFITS OF COLLABORATION AND SOCIAL BUSINESS
Although many articles and books have been written about collaboration, nearly all of the research on this topic is anecdotal. Nevertheless, there is a general belief among both business and academic communities that the more a business firm is “collaborative,” the more successful it will be, and that collaboration within and among firms is more essential than in the past. A recent global survey of business and information systems managers found that investments in collaboration technology produced organizational improvements that returned over four times the amount of the investment, with the greatest benefits for sales, marketing, and research and development functions (Frost and White, 2009).

Another study of the value of collaboration also found that the overall economic benefit of collaboration was significant: for every word seen by an employee in e-mails from others, $70 of additional revenue was generated (Aral, Brynjolfsson, and Van Alstyne, 2007). McKinsey & Company consultants predict that social technologies used within and across enterprises could potentially raise the productivity of interaction workers by 20 to 25 percent (McKinsey, 2012). Table 2.3 summarizes some of the benefits of collaboration and social business that have been identified.

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