With 20 years of product management and marketing experience, Christine Silva has directed the rapid growth of CSC’s Collaborative Enterprise program, beginning with its 2005 launch. Today, the program’s 100-plus team members deliver proven solutions that help organizations in many industries remove the barriers presented by time, geography and even technology.
csc.com: With the rise of Web 2.0, collaboration is once again a hot topic, from social networking sites to Wikipedia and beyond. Why is this the right time for organizations to focus on collaborative solutions?
Silva: There are really four drivers that make this the right time: globalization, the growing importance of innovation, the changing nature of work and the generational dynamics of today’s workforce. All of these macro forces are pushing collaborative solutions higher on the list of business and IT priorities. When I speak with clients about their business challenges, there’s definitely an interest in effective collaboration strategies that we haven’t seen before. And clients are thinking bigger than just videoconferencing or other disparate tools. What they’re looking for is a comprehensive approach to collaboration, one that integrates technologies, provides the critical change management support, and measures the connections, innovation, and value created.
csc.com:Of the four drivers you listed, let’s begin with globalization. How can collaborative solutions help organizations compete globally without losing cohesiveness?
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Silva:Today, enterprises are fundamentally “disaggregated” — organizationally, culturally and in other ways. Employees, customers and partners are more distributed than ever, and it’s expensive and burdensome to fly people all over. Providing cost savings on airline tickets is one thing, but collaborative solutions can do much more than that. Whenever you break apart the value chain, you introduce gaps of knowledge, responsiveness and innovation. An effective collaboration strategy can bridge those gaps and help organizations create competitive advantage, even in a “flat” world.
csc.com:You also mentioned innovation, which organizations increasingly need simply to remain competitive. How do collaborative solutions help create an environment in which innovative ideas flourish?
Silva:R&D companies are seeing, more and more, that good ideas come from outside organizational walls. But how do you tap into the wisdom of non-employees? How do you capture those good ideas when the people who come up with them don’t work for you? In this respect, the right kind of collaboration can give you a real-time link with non-employees, allowing you to dissolve some of the organizational boundaries between inside and outside. It’s like creating a virtual factory or a laboratory that reliably generates the innovation you need. When your customers talk to each other in a product review forum, for example, they may be defining exactly the improvements you need to make.
csc.com:Another driver is the changing nature of work. What are the changes you’re seeing, and how sweeping are they? How are collaborative solutions supporting this new world of work?
