Leveraging ICT in Entrepreneurial Ventures IV: Group Collaboration

Collaboration can be between people within your organisation eg sharing documents, ideas, leads and a single contact database. We could take it further and use the Internet to collaborate with partners, suppliers, distributors as well as clients with new web tools like Wikis, blogs, bookmarks and social networking sites like Facebook, Myspace and LinkedIn.
The emergence of the knowledge worker means increasingly that more and more of the key assets of an organization rest in the brains of their employees. So if there isn’t a platform that helps your employees share their knowledge, then they won’t collaborate well and teams will function sub-optimally and no synergies can be formed. As an example, suppose you have a 5 person marketing team. Each goes to different parts of the market and makes their own contacts independently. What happens the day one of them gets sick and is unavailable? – it means all critical information relating to the aspects of the market she was handling is lost to the organization. Worst still, what happens when she leaves the organization? She takes with her (in her brain so there’s nothing you can do about it) critical business information that can confer an advantage to your competitors. Sure you might not be able to do anything to stop an employee who wants to leave, however, with appropriate IT systems AND the supporting managerial systems in place that had let your employees share knowledge, contacts and resources, that information doesn’t need to be lost to the organization.
Collaboration doesn’t need to be done only by marketing department. It can also be done with partners in different locations around the world, with existing customers on product support and why not product-design? Picture this scenario … during a recent trip to Lagos, you meet a potential partner on the plane and exchange contact information. Later on getting back to base, you send him and email and arrange to chat using instant messenger. Even though you are in two different parts of the country or even the world, you can discuss the framework for a future collaboration, agree on specifics and then meet physically only to seal the deal. How much will that save you in travel costs and time lost being away from your base?
Similarly, amongst your staff in the office, it will be more cost effective to collaborate on documents digitally rather than having to print. Not only does this save you money in terms of not using paper but it also saves the environment (a key selling point to most businesses these days if you haven’t realized) and is faster once a good system is in place.