Is Unstructured Collaboration the Key to Business Agility?

According to a report by Microsoft it is (geared towards the manufacturing industry). Towards the end of last year Drew Gude, (Director, U.S. High Tech and Electronics Manufacturing Industry Solutions for Microsoft) wrote a report in which he said that “unstructured collaboration is going be the key to increased innovation and business agility in 2010.” Here’s the most relevant quote from the article:

“In 2010, manufacturers will adopt social collaboration tools as they look to integrate social computing tools and platforms into their business processes, linking internal communities and external communities.”

While I’m a bit skeptical on the time frame I definitely think this is the direction we are moving in and not just for the manufacturing industry. Drew cites the largest challenge as being able to integrate tier 1 business applications such as ERP, PLM, and CRM systems; something I’m sure Ray Wang from Altimeter Group is more suited to address that. Interestingly enough though, Ray recently wrote an article stating that tier 1 solutions are harder to justify and that it would make more sense to go with a two-tiered approach, but I’ll let …

Back to unstructured collaboration.

Drew highlights three key areas where he believes online collaboration will take off in 2010:

Innovation
Customer Self-Service
Partner Self-Service

Again, it’s important to note that the term “enterprise 2.0″ was not mentioned anywhere in the article (E2.0 usually refers to internal collaboration) as collaboration in this case refers to external facing customers (in addition to internal collaboration). What Drew touched upon in the bold quote above is the very basic premise of a social business; the ability to link and collaborate both internally and externally and to have that information flow both ways.

Drew also goes on to say:

“To ensure the level of business agility necessary to compete in 2010 and beyond, high tech enterprises must adopt an unstructured collaboration platform and integrate it with the structured, transactional applications to ensure their competitiveness.”

Sadly, this is again a tool-centric approach and not the right way to go about solving either innovation, customer service, or partner service challenges. The ability to compete in 2010 and beyond largely rests with change management and not with the platform that a company decides to integrate. I’m sure Drew didn’t mean that tools are more important than the people but I just wanted to make sure that is called out.

If you have a few minutes I highly recommend that you read the report from Drew over at Microsoft and let me know what you think.

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