One of the hardest parts of being a collaboration consultant is that quantifying and qualifying why collaboration is valuable, especially in knowledge-creation organizations, is extremely difficult. Everyone knows that collaboration is goodness, but why? What is it about collaboration that is just so great?
A while back, I heard a presentation by Jeffrey Mann and Carol Rozwell (Gartner Analysts), that summed up the (potential) value of collaboration nicely: they presented a collaboration maturity model, and occupying the top line was simply the phrase: “Collaboration as Competitive Advantage”. The slide said that collaboration, in its most mature form, collaboration is so ingrained in an organization’s activity that it gives them a competitive advantage over their competitors.
It’s put so simply, yet so accurately: organizations can best their competitors by enabling smart people to swarm quickly and deliver advantages in cost, quality, timeliness, and flexibility.
Collaboration enables improvement in all of these areas. We can reduce costs by improving efficiency and reducing duplicative effort. We can improve quality by increasing the number of eyes on a target and by bringing multiple points of view to bear on any given problem. We can improve our timeliness by again increasing efficiency, but also by better positioning information for discovery and integration. We can also improve our flexibility by empowering people to work across organizational lines and by not binding them to traditional production cycles (especially if that model doesn’t fit the problem).
So just as Nordstrom derives it’s competitive advantage from top-flight customer service and Wal-Mart from its ability to get low cost items to its stores efficiently, organizations can derive unique value from their ability to effectively and rapidly organize teams of smart people to solve hard problems. If an organization understands its own social networks, people, and leaders well enough, I contend that this advantage can be within reach.
Social Consulting 
Wow! This is a great post. I remember when you told me about this insight at the Gartner conference. In general, I think it is true that collaboration is more efficient. More collaborative processes can slow down productivity in some circumstances, but if designed under the appropriate circumstances, collaboration is a powerful competitive advantage.
“Organizations can best their competitors by enabling smart people…” What a huge key. “Smart” in this context is a familiar essential that is too often missing in certain areas in industry. Recently I came across the the concept of a Smart Welding Engineer through an international collegue on LinkedIn. He was bringing out the fact that for companies who manufacture welded products, the best solution to most manufacturing problems is to involve a Smart Welding Engineer. In our field, with 707% of “welding engineers” being that by job-title only, that’s not as easy as it sounds.
Collaboration is always critical, but if the people collaborating are not sufficiently “smart” in the areas needed, the collaboration is likely to produce far more of a mess than if a single expert simply applied his “smart” expertise.
Right on!
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