🔖 Topic- 3: Why are systems for collaboration and social business so important?

Collaboration is working with others to achieve shared and explicit goals. The collaboration focuses on task or mission accomplishment and usually takes place in a business or other organization and between businesses. You collaborate with a colleague in Tokyo having expertise on a topic about which you know nothing. You collaborate with many colleagues in publishing a company blog. If you’re in a law firm, you collaborate with accountants in an accounting firm in servicing the needs of a client with tax problems.

Employees may collaborate in informal groups that are not a formal part of the business firm’s organizational structure, or they may be organized into formal teams. Teams have a specific mission that someone in the business assigned to them. Team members need to collaborate on the accomplishment of specific tasks and collectively achieve the team mission. The team mission might be to “win the game” or “increase online sales by 10 percent.” Teams are often short-lived, depending on the problems they tackle and the length of time needed to find a solution and accomplish the mission.

Collaboration and teamwork are more important today than ever for a variety of reasons.

• Changing nature of work. The nature of work has changed from factory manufacturing and pre-computer office work where each stage in the production process occurred independently of one another and was coordinated by supervisors. Work was organized into silos. Within a silo, work passed from one machine tool station to another, from one desktop to another, until the finished product was completed.
• Growth of professional work. “Interaction” jobs tend to be professional jobs in the service sector that require close coordination and collaboration. Professional jobs require substantial education and the sharing of information and opinions to get work done.
• Changing the organization of the firm. For most of the industrial age, managers organized work in a hierarchical fashion. Orders came down the hierarchy, and responses moved back up the hierarchy. Today, work is organized into groups and teams, and the members are expected to develop their own methods for accomplishing the task. Senior managers observe and measure results but are much less likely to issue detailed orders or operating procedures. In part, this is because expertise and decision-making power have been pushed down in organizations.
• Changing scope of the firm. The work of the firm has changed from a single location to multiple locations—offices or factories throughout a region, a nation, or even around the globe. For instance, Henry Ford developed the first mass-production automobile plant at a single Dearborn, Michigan, factory. In 2015, Ford employed 199,000 people at about 67 plants worldwide. With this kind of global presence, the need for close coordination of design, production, marketing, distribution, and service obviously takes on new importance and scale. Large global companies need to have teams working on a global basis.
• Emphasis on innovation. Although we tend to attribute innovations in business and science to great individuals, these great individuals are most likely working with a team of brilliant colleagues. Think of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs (founders of Microsoft and Apple), both of whom are highly regarded innovators and both of whom built strong collaborative teams to nurture and support innovation in their firms.
• Changing culture of work and business. Most research on collaboration supports the notion that diverse teams produce better outputs faster than individuals working on their own. Popular notions of the crowd (“crowdsourcing” and the “wisdom of crowds”) also provide cultural support for collaboration and teamwork.