Digital Daisy: collaboration

Sunday, May 10, 2009

Collaboration - the Nightmare of Control Freaks?

The buzzword creeping into our daily lives is "collaboration". Social networking and Internet technology have created a heightened awareness of creating things together.

The Age of Collaboration
News is created from millions of people posting one-liners on twitter.com about what is happening in the world.

Project teams work together with increasing ease using huddle.net and zoho.com as project managers. A second-year student recently told me he will be spending his summer developing an online game. His programmer is in India and his designer somewhere else and he had never met them in person. But he is in business!

Biographies are written in rich media by postings and comments on sites such as facebook.

Research comes together in collaborative online documents in Google Docs or zoho.com.

Software is co-created on open-source platforms.

And this includes only some of the stuff that is close to my own world.

The Impact of Collaboration on Product and Service

My eyes opened this week when our production team was questioned on testing of our final products (video, web and print). Convention has it that the buck for quality output stops with the supplier. The collaborative world says: "There is no client or supplier but rather a collaboration of stakeholders. After all, years after release 1.0 Microsoft is still fixing bugs in Vista."

The statement certainly made me understand that my worldview is shifting under my feet. My question is how do I handle the expectations of outcomes amongst clients who do not believe they are paying for the joy of collaboration vs. the ones who may be appreciating just the opposite?

As a control freak who at the same time would pay for the privilege to play for the joy of collaboration, I am still left with the question...

Tuesday, May 5, 2009

Collaborate in the Clouds with CRM

Collaboration and cloud computing are two emerging business trends that are shaping how businesses work.

Collaborating in the Clouds

Younger workers grow up in a culture of online collaboration, from gaming to social networks to the workplace. Cloud computing, or software and digital storage that "sit somewhere in the clouds" on a third party server that can be accessed from any internet connected computer, make such collaboration much easier.

The Value of Contact Records

Managing company contacts in such a way is fast becoming the way forward. Contact information for customers, suppliers, staff and stakeholders form a valuable corporate asset. Easy access to such information saves time, creates efficiency and simplifies collaboration between, for example, a mobile sales force, an office administrator and a CEO. Contact information can be expanded beyond name, address, phone numbers and email address. Information about conversations, documents, scheduled actions and more can be added to this client record to start adding intelligence to the database that can be mined for future sales, customer support, market research and more.

Using CRM software

A Customer Relationship Management system (CRM) provides the framework for capturing contact information and records into a giant database and it provides the tools to extract reports from this database. Such a system provides the intelligence upon which a continued relationship can be built.

Traditionally CRM's were internally hosted in a secure environment to protect valuable contact information from competitors. Increasingly, effective online CRMs become available with the benefit of universal access from the office, home or from the road.

Online CRM tools

Here are a few online CRM tools, each with its own strengths and weaknesses:

Mobileme (developed by Apple)

Myevents

People Matrix (adapted for HR)

Pipelinedeals

Salesboom