Integrating Collaboration Technology Deeply into Business Process and Applications

Accenture argues that collaboration projects must start by identifying specific work processes that more effective collaboration can improve. Accenture further suggests dividing this process-oriented strategy for collaboration into key work streams.

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The days when enterprise leaders could afford to ignore the need to support collaboration are over. As the products and services of the modern enterprise have increasingly outstripped the expertise of any one person, any one department or even any one company, effective collaboration has become an increasingly crucial component of business success.

At the same time, factors such as the size, structure and distributed nature of the typical enterprise can create challenging roadblocks to effective collaboration, making it important for management to support collaboration with carefully crafted initiatives, including the right technology.

A key lesson Accenture has learned about collaboration technology is that the starting point of any collaboration initiative should not be the new tools that are available, but, rather, which processes are being targeted for improvement.

At Accenture, we believe that the focus on collaboration toolkits must evolve into a focus on process-driven collaboration initiatives. We define a process driven collaboration initiative simply as one that is structured around collaboration solutions focused specifically on driving the effectiveness of clearly identified processes.

This means improving the efficiency of the process and/or the quality of its output by improving how the participants in the process communicate, coordinate and share knowledge—both amongst themselves, and with other relevant people who may not be directly involved in the process.

We organize the process-oriented strategy for driving effective collaboration workstreams into key workstreams, core workstreams, and advanced and emerging workstreams.

The core workstreams are:

• A needs analysis workstream that targets specific process changes to be addressed through improved collaboration.
  
  
• An enablement workstream in which the technology needed to achieve the targeted collaboration activities is selected and deployed.
  
  
• A support workstream in which the technology is maintained; messaging developed; and training, performance support, and incentives rolled out to support the collaboration technologies and the improved collaborative processes those technologies enable.

The advanced workstreams are:

• Embedding collaboration into the tools used to execute target processes.
  
  
• Integrating the business applications deeply enough with the collaboration tools to generate meaningful, “intelligent” messages that users and technologies can act on.
  
  
• Increasing automation, with tools that proactively handle the management of collaboration functions and support automated knowledge sharing with a minimum of effort required on either the publishing or retrieval ends.

Contact Accenture to find out how we can help your organization develop a strategy for using collaboration technologies effectively.