Collaboration Technology - Not an unmixed blessing

Like any other thing in life we can make a good or a bad thing of the collaboration technology. And like any other thing in life, collaboration technology is a mixed blessing. It can be used in wasteful ways and can be the cause of many social and business ills. Like anything else in life we need to learn to use it intelligently and wisely.

The 21st Century Infrastucture

Collaboration is the 21st century infrastructure. If we think of the 20th century as having been built on the transportation infrastructure, 21st century is likely to be build around collaboration infrastructure.

Collaboration is the fourth generation of productivity tools using computing technologies (After Computing, Office productivity & Process Automation).

Collaboration handles the exceptions in the business flow and exceptions are a majority.

Substituting travel and transportation with Collaboration technologies can make for a greener world.

Therefore, to us as users of collaboration technology there lies ahead a big opportunity to reduce costs, improve productivity, improve response, build greater adaptability etc. (all translating to greater sustainability for our enterprise).

Collaboration Vs Competition

There is too much emphasis placed on Competition as a way to succeed in life and in business. So what I'd like to discuss here is the less often discussed way of 'collaboration' as a way to succeed.

Collaboration has always existed in all of Life's history. And there will always be need for collaboration. Much of the success of the human race and indeed that for many many a species on our planet has been the result of collaboration.

Collaborating is perhaps the only way to find enduring solutions. As societies and businesses evolves and become more complex and interdependent collaboration perhaps is the only way to find solutions that don't run into other people's interests and end up in exhausting conflicts.

Collaboration is the only way to do bigger things - the joint stock company, the Public-Private Partnership, the supply chain, the value networks, the wiki, the projects, the standards, open source software etc. are all examples of collaboration.

Indeed any human enterprise is collaboration at work.

Business ecosystem & Collaboration

One of the very critical pieces for business success is the the business ecosystem, the network of service providers, suppliers, resellers etc. that help an enterprise create and deliver value to it's customer.

As industries and businesses mature, there is a greater and greater portion of this value that gets created outside the enterprise, in order to achieve speed, cost advantage and scale.

Collaboration software in turn is like the overarching Information and Communication system that help the enterprise manage these relationships and engagements more efficiently.

Humility & Synergy

"In today's increasingly connected world, humility becomes relevant not only for us as individuals, but also for groups. A recent study at Carnegie Mellon University showed that collective intelligence had little to do with the IQs of individuals in that group. So even if you bring together the smartest people, there is no guarantee of better team performance; in fact, it's been shown that team outcomes have much more to do with how skillfully people collaborate. Individual motivations for actively engaging in a group effort lie at the heart of effective collaboration. Such motivation is rooted in how much value we ascribe outside of ourselves. A key aspect of this is humility: it motivates a right-sized assessment of our own abilities and an awareness of our limitations. A self-view that recognizes its limitations is vital in order for real synergy to occur. This is what allows us to be receptive to other people's contributions, knowing that they often augment our own. In a group, the more that people are rooted in a mindset of humility, the greater the potential synergy."

Reference : http://www.huffingtonpost.com/viral-mehta/humility-virtue_b_881912.html

Collaborative designing

"The historical way of developing products just doesn't work when you're as ambitious as we are. When the challenges are that complex, you have to develop a product in a more collaborative, integrated way."

- Jonathan Ive, head of design at Apple

cooperation and prosperity

...in the end, business and prosperity are a results of cooperating on a large scale with everybody

- Peruvian Economist Hernando de Soto