Collaborative Solutions — The Time Is Now
An Interview with CSC’s Christine Silva
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.
Christine Silva, Director, Collaborative Market Solutions, CSC
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?
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.
Related Information:
Learn more about CSC’s Collaborative Enterprise offerings.Read about a CSC knowledge management network that connects oil industry leaders.
Check out CSC’s customizable infrastructure outsourcing solutions.
Contact us and let our experience help you produce results.
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?
Silva: The past decades of IT investment have been about taking repeatable, manual processes and automating them by building applications and systems. Instead of manual tasks, you have problem-solving work. Instead of routines, you have exceptions to the system. The workers who deal with these exceptions need technology to help them think creatively and tap into intellectual property — and that’s where collaborative solutions come in. To give one example, an effective collaboration strategy means that an organization’s most authoritative subject matter experts are available to share insights on demand and in real time, which is obviously more helpful than a basic knowledge management portal.
csc.com: You mentioned a second large-scale shift — a generational changing of the guard in the workplace. How can collaborative solutions help organizations retain employees just entering the workforce and capture the expertise of those about to leave?
Silva: There’s a huge generational change that’s happening, and it’s at both ends of the spectrum. On one end you have “digital natives” — young people who have never meaningfully known a world without the Internet. They actively create content by blogging, commenting or uploading videos. They’re comfortable establishing strong relationships with people they’ll never meet face to face. When digital natives enter the workforce, they bring expectations for online collaboration — social networking within the enterprise, co-creation of content and opportunities to provide feedback and solicit ideas from others. Organizations that don’t meet these expectations find their newly minted employees are leaving. E-mail, maybe some instant-messaging, and a portal to view pay stubs? When it comes to the youngest workers, a set of disparate collaboration tools just isn’t enough.
At the other end of the spectrum you have the baby boomers. More people are retiring over the next few years than ever before. And when they retire, the organization’s hard-won intellectual property also walks out the door. What can be done about this? As with the first challenge, collaboration tools can help mitigate the issue by providing new ways of harnessing, organizing, and sharing information.
csc.com: CSC has helped BAE Systems, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and others benefit from seamless collaboration. Based on this experience, what advice would you give to organizations that need a better approach to collaboration, but don’t know where to start?
Silva: A good place to begin is with this fact: There’s no one way to collaborate. Collaboration can happen in real time (as instantaneous communication) or offline (as content development to which many people contribute day or night). It can take place in an informal, one-on-one instant-messaging chat, or in a formal, regulated workgroup or project team setting. It can involve two peers communicating with each other or a single individual reaching out to a bureaucracy. The different ways of collaborating certainly don’t end there. That’s a key reason we designed CSC’s Collaborative Enterprise solutions to be the opposite of a one-size-fits-all approach, with maximum flexibility for our clients across the entire solution life cycle. The bottom line is that smart organizations will identify the many different ways they collaborate — that’s the most critical first step to take. Then they will design a strategy that perfectly supports their unique and rapidly evolving culture of collaboration.
csc.com: You mentioned a second large-scale shift — a generational changing of the guard in the workplace. How can collaborative solutions help organizations retain employees just entering the workforce and capture the expertise of those about to leave?
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Related Information: Learn more about CSC’s Collaborative Enterprise offerings. Read about a CSC knowledge management network that connects oil industry leaders. Check out CSC’s customizable infrastructure outsourcing solutions. Contact us and let our experience help you produce results. |
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At the other end of the spectrum you have the baby boomers. More people are retiring over the next few years than ever before. And when they retire, the organization’s hard-won intellectual property also walks out the door. What can be done about this? As with the first challenge, collaboration tools can help mitigate the issue by providing new ways of harnessing, organizing, and sharing information.
csc.com: CSC has helped BAE Systems, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and others benefit from seamless collaboration. Based on this experience, what advice would you give to organizations that need a better approach to collaboration, but don’t know where to start?
Silva: A good place to begin is with this fact: There’s no one way to collaborate. Collaboration can happen in real time (as instantaneous communication) or offline (as content development to which many people contribute day or night). It can take place in an informal, one-on-one instant-messaging chat, or in a formal, regulated workgroup or project team setting. It can involve two peers communicating with each other or a single individual reaching out to a bureaucracy. The different ways of collaborating certainly don’t end there. That’s a key reason we designed CSC’s Collaborative Enterprise solutions to be the opposite of a one-size-fits-all approach, with maximum flexibility for our clients across the entire solution life cycle. The bottom line is that smart organizations will identify the many different ways they collaborate — that’s the most critical first step to take. Then they will design a strategy that perfectly supports their unique and rapidly evolving culture of collaboration.