8 Ways To Benchmark Your Collaboration Strategy

Rob Koplowitz is a Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, where he serves information & knowledge management professionals. He is a frequent contributor to Forrester’s Blog For Information & Knowledge Management Professionals. 

8 Ways To Benchmark Your Collaboration Strategy    

It used to be that a company-wide collaboration strategy was a nice-to-have. No more.  Now, it’s a strategic necessity. 

Even in the current economic climate, 37 percent of organizations surveyed in Forrester's Q4 2008 enterprise and SMB software survey consider implementing a collaboration strategy important in 2009. 

What’s driving the collaboration wave? Forrester sees two broad trends driving this:  there is a critical need to drive information worker efficiency and to manage the unstructured content artifacts they produce and, while the value of improved collaboration is clear, the path to success has become more complex. 

Collaboration strategies today need to encompass a broad array of organizational and technical criteria. The potential benefits can be substantial, and the risk associated with poor management of collaborative content and communication artifacts can be costly. 

I’ll be talking more about benchmarking in an upcoming Forrester webinar (free registration HERE) but, for the time being, here are eight things you need to do to benchmark your collaboration strategy: 

1 -- Assemble stakeholders. 

Collaboration has broad implications, and the stakeholders who you will need to drive the strategy must represent various organizational and geographical parts of your organization. Expect to work with a broad array of business and IT users, including users representing broad business perspectives and other representing broad geographic requirements, IT professionals representing broad business capabilities, infrastructure and operations professionals and human resources and legal professionals. 

2 -- Determine collaboration objectives. 

A collaboration strategy needs to be anchored by business requirements. Key business objectives that require assessment are workers' ability to find relevant information and to identify expertise within the organization. Once information and expertise are identified, what mechanisms are in place to facilitate efficient interaction and knowledge reuse? 

3 -- Conduct a workforce assessment. 

Not all workers will want or require the same collaboration capabilities. Forrester recently published its Workforce Technographics data, a survey of over 2,000 information workers on what enterprise tools they are using. Some will need specialized capabilities like extensive mobile support or the ability to collaborate across organizational and firewall boundaries. Provisioning the correct level of capabilities for each segment of a heterogeneous workforce can drive down costs associated with a broad collaboration project.

4 -- Pay attention to organization and policy. 

Collaboration software requires special attention in regard to organization and policy. The ad hoc nature of collaborative interactions opens the door for breaches in security, privacy, and regulatory compliance. While some of these can be handled programmatically through one or more technical solutions, many will require specific policy. With proper diligence, introduction of new collaborative technology to the environment does not increase risk. In fact, it can aid in significantly lowering risk. Further, collaborative technology is increasingly integrating with other business applications. To that end, the organization supporting a collaboration environment needs to include stakeholders to represent those systems.

5 -- Select a collaboration technology. 

While technology is only one component of collaboration success, it remains the biggest slice of the collaboration budget and an important lever for business productivity. The landscape of available collaboration technology is rich, and choosing and integrating the right technology for an organization is a challenge. The assessment instrument provides detailed guidance on every major collaboration category: information-sharing, communications, social networking, and an integrated user experience across all tools.

6 -- Develop a service delivery model. 

Collaboration requires enterprise-scale services to manage team sites globally, use a single network that allows global presence or search, and implement global standards for the tool kit. In best practice, this means implementing a service delivery model that encompasses operating globally for consistency, access, and governance; deploying servers regionally to lower latency and to allow incremental deployments; and pushing administration and needed control down to local administrators to empower the needs of specific groups and regions. Our assessment tool will help you prioritize and assess gaps in these areas. 

7 -- Develop a change management strategy. 

The old saying, "If you build it they will come," has not always been true for collaboration solutions. Many organizations have struggled to drive adoption of technologies like workspaces, instant messaging, and knowledge management systems. Information workers have a great deal of autonomy in carrying out their jobs and may be hesitant to adopt new tools if they doubt the value. A change management strategy is needed to assess the requirements of tools by workforce need and ensure proper adoption.

 8 -- Measure the impact. 

To link technology investment to business impact, a collaboration strategy will mandate metrics on adoption, use, and impact. A collaboration strategy will help you prioritize metrics in four tiers: adoption, activity, cost avoidance, and productivity improvements.  

The road to success can be complicated, but is definitely manageable. The greater the rigor that can be applied to the process of developing a strategy, the greater the chances of success.

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Comments

[Lokesh Datta]

I am struck by how similar your outline is to a typical, well-execute strategy development and implementation model.

I have often seen teams/organizations starting out with a focus on tools, prior to establishing collaboration needs, goals, outcomes and process. IT should be a partner in the collaborative process and not the singular decision-maker.

Your readers may benefit from collaboration points-of-view, original research, reviews of products and services, interviews with industry luminaries, and the “best of” articles on the web at: http://allcollaboration.com/

[The Garland Group]

Completely agree that collaboration is a must have strategy within organizations today. We've seen that it helps organizations to leverage resources, share knowledge, decrease time to market and really just make their enterprise more agile. I like #7 because we tend to assume the "If you build it they will come" mentality. Like anything else however, collaboration demands a shift in the organization's culture. This shift shouldn't come as a result of adding new technology but should start prior. One thing I would add to #7 is a "Collaboration or Change Champion" - someone who can rally the team and really show how collaboration benefits them and the company as a whole.

[Collaborateking]

This is a great list. It would be even better if you could re-order the list starting with "Measure the Impact" We are guilty at http://collaborationking.com of telling mostly about the first 7 points, even though we focus on all aspects of collaboration. The actual execution and actual quantitative ways to see if more effective collaboration actually changes the business results.