CONTACT

Collaboration" is defined as "people working together on non-routine cognitive work." This activity is about behavior, work habits, culture, management, and business goals and value. Often companies already have some level of collaboration efforts when they start formalizing their strategies. Leading companies have integrated collaboration into business processes or "contextual collaboration." The opportunity means finding the right balance between your company goals and objectives, and your ability to support collaborative work. Also, the key to unlocking this opportunity is to have a clear understanding of where your company is today and where it needs to be in the future, based on business goals.

The contextual collaboration stage poses the next challenge with which most companies will need help (see "How to Exploit Contextual Collaboration" ). Contextual collaboration will help companies bridge several chasms that chronically reduce productivity, such as the geographic dispersal of workers, the handling of exceptions to processes, coordinating management when there's joint responsibility and working across organizational boundaries. Because each company has unique needs and processes, the correct approach is to find the right collaboration tools for each task before embedding them into business applications.