Collaboration: The New Competitive Imperative

Over the past two decades, managers have extracted enormous gains in productivity by re-engineering and improving the efficiency of transactional activities in their organizations. Order processing, supply management, production and other routine activities have been optimized, with a resulting decrease in the number of workers in these categories. And these are the activities that are most easily deployed to geographies with lower labour costs.

Just recently, I did a mailing to about 100 contacts, and needed addresses scraped from the web and put into Excel. It took me about 20 minutes to go to odesk, hire an excellent data entry person in the Ukraine for $6/hr and get the work done there. Unbelievably convenient.

As more and more of our workers move from repetitive transactional activities to those which require judgement, creativity and "high bandwidth" communication, the new challenge is to improve the effectiveness of things that can't be done by machine. How can we improve the productivity of sales people, marketing managers, lawyers and others?

The first step is to get the right information in front of them. Consider the value of getting the right data in the right form at the right time in front of a trader working for an investment bank. A one second delay, an incorrect number, or data presented such that the trader cannot easily find what he is looking for could cost hundreds of millions of dollars!

So lets transfer that metaphor to salespeople, doctors, marketers etc. The promise of CRM is that a salesperson can turn their attention to a particular account and quickly get access to every bit of information about that customer. How well is that working today? Better than before, but lots of room for improvement would be my summary. Suppose that in addition to previous orders, previous conversations, names of the customer's kids and birthdays we could show industry news, trends, information about related companies etc so that the salesperson can anticipate customer needs before a sales call. This is about listening carefully to the customer before having a meeting.

Still, this approach is much like former efforts to re-engineer and improve the effectiveness of transactional activities. The real opportunity is in recognizing that what happens between the customer and the salesperson is really collaboration. How can we make this collaboration more effective?

There are those who profit by hiding information from their customers or suppliers, and that will continue to be the case for some time. But in the end, the hidden information will bite one or the other, and overall productivity will be lost. An open and trusting relationship maximizes overall productivity. Open and trusting relationships occur, when people collaborate over a shared view of the future.

Collaborative Performance works to this objective - assisting managers in collaborating widely in real-time on a shared view of future results. The outcome - significant productivity gains for the growing proportion of non-transactional workers in the workforce.

Reference: Competitive advantage from better interactions