Five Ideas: Collaboration

Experts agree that social networking and web 2.0 tools are not just a fad. In fact, collaboration may be key to solving the economic crisis, and sparking a green solutions. But as corporations invest time and resources developing Wikis, blogs and other tools that encourage their employees — and even their customers — to work together, company leaders are encountering some challenging problems, from how to create a cooperative culture at work, to how to ensure sercurity. Read on to hear what experts are saying about working together, and get their advice for getting the highest return on your efforts.

“One of the most important things about [Generation Y is that] they are extremely collaborative. They’re wonderful at taking advantage of every resource available to them whether that’s their professors, alumni, strategic partners, or their parents, roommates and friends.  They are not huddled away in their spare bedrooms or garages fussing with technology on their own. They’re out gathering information and telling people what they’re doing.”—Donna Fenn, author of Upstarts!: How GenY Entrepreneurs are Rocking the World of Business and 8 Ways You Can Profit from Their Success

“Businesses can ill afford to ignore good ideas, patterns, trends or brainstorms because of their origin....And yet how much of your company information is filed away in a shared network drive somewhere? How many ideas are embedded in a project proposal or a statement of work or a technical architecture project document for a particular customer? How many good ideas happen to be present on one slide of a power point deck that is 44 slides long?... If you want to get more out of your information then you have to create ecosystems that enable information re-use and accidental collaboration. Rather than relying on serendipity (“Hey, I stumbled across this old power point deck the other day and on slide 18 there is something I think we can do for that new customer!”) you foster and environment where people are invited, incented to participate and recognized for their participation.”—Billy Cripe. Enterprise 2.0 & ECM Product Management

“Companies of the future are going to be far more transparent and far more open, because it's going to be a much more open and transparent society. And in this blogging, open, tweeting world we're evolving into, everybody thinks their opinion matters And that's not always bad. If you're really inviting 7 billion people in the world into a conversation, maybe we'll find solutions in different ways.”—Andrew Winston, author of Green Recovery

“Companies have two things on their mind: saving money immediately and positioning themselves for the recovery, to work smarter and work better. There aren't many things you can do to in technology to hit those hard simultaneously, but collaboration is one of those... Version 1.5 is a big deal for Beehive. Prior to 1.5, the Beehive platform was available, the email and messaging components were available, the conferencing and Synchronous and presence and instant messaging components were available, but we had not yet made available are core interface for teams to work together.”—David Gilmour, Oracle's senior vice president of collaboration technologies

“In the coming generation, the use of social tools with which folks provide constant input to the corporation, either consciously or unconsciously, will expand. Oracle’s Agile PLM and other Oracle application areas have Twitter, blog, and Facebook pages now. We’re constantly communicating information in terms of new products, new opportunities for networking with other customers, and programs for providing input to Oracle. When companies incorporate feedback from these and other sources into their CRM systems, they begin to see a set of consumer data that can be relayed to PLM to create better products.” —Sarvesh Jagannivas, vice president of product marketing, Oracle’s Agile product lifecycle management (PLM) applications.