next generation collaboration

Next Generation Collaboration

Learn how the 98% that deploy collaboration solutions get results

Whitepaper

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2014 Arena Solutions, Inc. Arena and Arena Solutions are trademarks of Arena Solutions, Inc., Reg. U.S. Pat. & Tm. Off.All rights reserved. Other product and company names are the property of their respective holders.

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Power of CollaborationAn FDA compliance expert in Washington, a disruptive component

supplier in China, an engineer in Russia with a startling add-on

feature what do they have in common? And most importantly,

how do you leverage their knowledge to benefit your business?

The answer: next generation social collaboration tools.

Lets demystify the term social collaboration. Simply put, its just

a series of conversationschats, debates, sharing of knowledge

to achieve a business goal. It involves gathering people, asking

questions, collecting ideas, surfacing information, and getting

feedback on deliverables. Its the way most work gets done

whether it is memorialized or not.

Gartner describes the goal of social collaboration to encourage,

capture, and organize open and free-form interaction between

employees, customers, and partners, and to facilitate the creation and leverage of collective knowledge. (1)

Studies have proven that over 75 percent of organizational learning is via informal knowledge and information

sharing.

In fact, in a recent global Accenture survey of 4,000 business people, 98 percent who deployed social

collaboration reported improved business benefits. (2) These results included helping teams locate subject matter experts faster, find information necessary to innovate, and work more efficiently on projects with external stakeholders.

Collaboration makes the process of brainstorming, ideation,

innovation, and the generation of ideas better. And easier. Its

the benefits of combining business enterprise with collaboration features that breed co-creation, shared value, and foster a culture of

collaboration that can be leveraged additionally elsewhere beyond

the network. The extension is akin to expanding your market

presence from two to three dimensions.

While the adjectives smarter, faster and easier would seem ample

fodder to make this vehicle universally desirable, curiously many

innovative product companies have shrunk from adopting social

solutions. Common concerns are that collaboration tools waste

time, lead to inconsequential opinions, and spin-out into unrelated

tangential, meandering threads that add little value to the bottom line.

Unfortunately, companies that surrender to this one-dimensional perspective are missing out on a very powerful

medium. A medium so engaging it has virtually re-written the textbook on how billions globally elect to spend their

time. A collaborative solution so flexible it fosters a culture of continuous improvement, and encourages teams to be more proactive to ensure better quality products.

Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more money on R&D. Its not about money. Its about the people you have, how youre led, and how much you get it. Steve Jobs


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In this whitepaper, youll discover:

Advantage of a Collaboration Solution over email

The business value of a formal collaboration strategy

Options for rolling out a collaboration feature initiative with social elements

How to scale enterprise-wide tool adoption

Benefits of collaborating within the product record

Advantage of a Collaboration Solution Over Email

Social tools, such as Facebook and Twitter, now trump email as the primary means of sharing in the consumer

world. Similarly, manufacturing enterprises are now looking to harness the power of collaboration solutions to

improve business results.

Enterprise social collaboration is not just a mediumits a means of transforming business processes and

releasing the power of your human capital and capturing it in a single knowledge-base repository. By collaborating,

youll bring consumer-like social experiences to the supply chain. Everyone within a manufacturing organization

engineers, operation managers, executives, even supplierscan share their domain knowledge broadly within

their groups, or narrowly across discrete functions at their election.

Some companies have questioned whether the benefits really extend beyond what they get by sharing emails. From a security risk perspective, collaborative knowledge sharing and exchanging emails are quite similar; in

a world where any email can be forwarded to anyone, content is only as secure as the people with whom it is

shared. A good collaboration solution allows users to share knowledge with targeted audiences just as one can

limit the audience for a single email, only with the former theres an audit trail.


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But from a benefits point of view, collaborative knowledge sharing is vastly superior to simply exchanging emails. In short, emails are about information

exchange, while collaborative sharing is not only about sharing, but also about

aggregating and passing along deep tribal domain knowledge catapulting this

group knowledge to a to a fact-based repository-plus giving participants the

ability to then act on that knowledge.

Imagine a situation where a team is sending emails to collaborate on the design

of a new product. The email gets sent to a selected audience, and read by

some subset of that audience. After that, the email is deleted or archivedbut

only locally. In either case, its essentially lost to others in the organization that

might need that same information later.

Don Tapscott, who wrote Wikinomics, How Mass Collaboration Changes

Everything, said problem resolution via email leaves no organizational memory

of the event, with the risk that only the people involved in creating the solution

walk away with any new insightssolutions will be reinvented every time the

problem reoccurs. (3) That leads to an enormous waste of time and money

within your organization.

Just as Excels one-dimensional spreadsheets failed as a tool needed to

manage bill of material (BOMs) as complexity and rate of change spun out of

control, so does email fall short of the knowledge-sharing potential that next-

generation collaboration solutions offer OEMs.

Emails were never meant to be shared, aggregated, chronicled, archived or

re-read ad infinitum. Nor does their original context tend to survive once a great amount of time has passed or original transcribers leave the scene. Emails

are not easy to manage, thus making the discovery of critical information

difficult and ascertaining the key benefits of collective intelligence challenging. Collaborative knowledge sharing posts are the fundamental, aggregated

building blocks of an enterprises collective intelligence and one of the key

enablers of a true knowledge base repository.

Collaboration Lessons From Broadway

A note to OEMs everywhere. Before you decide to tap into the collective wisdom of those you knowor may not knowto collaborate and generate creative ideas, consider research by Brian Uzzi.

Brian Uzzi, a professor at Northwestern Universitys Kellogg School of Management, discovered that successful collaboration depended upon the careful selection of team members to tackle a problem efficiently with the greatest creativity.

To make his case, Uzzi looked at the composition of several Broadway musical creative teams and the impact those teams had on the success of the show.

His research found that the same small group of people who are well-known to one another often work on the same shows. But that familiarity didnt bring great creativity or financial success. At the same time, those teams that had people who didnt know one another fared the same, he discovered.

He discovered that the most successful creative teams were made up of those who knew one another before, as well as those unknown to one another. The reason? Uzzi believes that teams that have too much overlap in their social networks are less creative because they generally have the same knowledgeand teams composed of all newcomers dont do a good job of sharing what they know with other people.

The discovery: having a mix of both groups was the key to success. Look no further than the eclectic team behind the Broadway musical Book of Mormon as proof that this works.

My goal is to have people recognize that success isnt just based on internal talent and knowledge, Uzzi explained. Success is partially derived from relationships with other people, through whom they get access to expertise and capabilities beyond themselves.


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The Importance of a Formalized Collaboration Strategy

A formalized business strategy is the first step to launching and ensuring a successful collaboration program. Without a formal business plan, deployment and ad hoc adoption may fall short. Oddly, the assimilation required

to do something that is so very natural in one arena and yet feels so foreign in the workplace will not succeed

without the advance rigor and deliberative efforts to formally implement it.

A business strategy may determine a collaboration solution could help to more efficiently solve customer issues, connect with hard-to-find manufacturing experts or collaborate with globally dispersed supply chain teams. Another might make the case for an open, democratic workspace assuaging governance anxiety, fears and

security concerns from naysayers who oppose a collaboration implementation.

After a plan is defined, the next step is to get buy-in from top executives. These shepherds should then learn the unique needs of each group within the company, and provide a supply chain-wide campaign of education and

awareness to encourage cross-functional participation.

Getting out of ones cultural comfort zone can translate to an epiphany that a social approach for sharing can

streamline product design processes, accelerate time to market and reduce engineering change order cycle times.

But to have a successful collaboration program rolled out, an OEM must define clear deployment and adoption strategies, and their leaders must personally embrace it.


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Three Distinct Deployment Strategies

A rollout strategy addresses the different ways that collaboration can be deployed across the supply chain and

where to place the focus within the organization. Many innovative product companies choose to take a viral

approach. Rather than target any particular business unit or employee group, a company can opt to announce the

collaboration model and let teams join and invite co-workers to to participate on their own.

Alternatively, some manufacturers choose to take a more structured and phased methodology that makes

the solution available to defined functions (operation, engineering, document control) over a scheduled rollout timeframe. The benefit of this strategy is by constraining availability, decision-makers can more easily gather lessons learned, adjust and iterate with course changes along the way based on feedback. The third option is a

more formal enterprise rollout, which is more akin to a complete company-wide software migration. In essence,

this means releasing the collaboration tools to all users across the enterprise at the same time.

One might ask, when initiating a program do you always start with the executive team? Should it be a managed

release? Or should your collaboration initiative be introduced as a viral offering? Youll have to decide based on

your unique business needs.

Adoption Strategy How to Entice Participation

When referring to enterprise collaboration, the technology is the easy part. The real challenges center around user

adoption. There are a number of different approaches that can be taken when it comes to ensuring the adoption

of a social collaboration strategy. There are heavy-handed methods of governance, mandating the use of social

platforms, thereby making adoption mandatory and not voluntary. These are rarely crowd pleasers.

Another approach is a content embargo that seeds both existing and new content on the platform. And locking

it down means taking materials that users need for their job, removing it from its current location, and migrating

it only onto the new collaboration platform. While this may frustrate users initially because it disrupts their current

method of accessing information, it is a tough-love way to ensure adoption. Enterprise portals, such as WIKIs,

originated under this very methodology with the proposed benefit of bringing all of an organizations tools and content under a single umbrella.


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Within an innovative product company there will be varying levels of openness, comfort and familiarity with social

tools. A common mistake is to simply ask the general user population who wants to be a champion? It is not just

a matter of having eager people, but the right people. This is why empowering champions, who not are just users

of collaboration tools, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or blogs, but additionally subject matter experts in the

new medium makes sense.

These champions can be helpful in mobilizing the population to become engaged. They can tutor others in the

organization that may be initially skeptical about the value of social collaboration. These experts can also help an

enterprise share the successes of those who are already on board to generate initial momentum.

Social collaboration is much less a technological pursuit and far more a human capital initiative. Ultimately, this

technology is a way to empower your employees to work together. Better. People, rather than processes, are

the key to successful adoption, particularly when it is their idea. Business value and esprit de corp increases as

more colleagues participate in social collaborationa phenomenon referred to as the network effect in which a

solutions potential can scale as more people use it.


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The Power of Collaborating Within the Product Record

A manufacturers ability to facilitate efficient collaboration among team members across its supply chain is one of the more underappreciated keys to its success. Many OEMs embrace modern PLM solutions to remove the

collaboration barrier and to synchronize communications across the dispersed supply chain.

Modern cloud-based product lifecycle management (PLM) solutions provide OEMs with automated change

features, controlled access to right versions of the product record, and visibility into all design and engineering

change proposals. These capabilities increase collaboration, provide access to the latest information, and provide

deep insights into strategic purchasing opportunitiesall while giving greater control to the documentation

process. Just imagine the potential to transform business processes if a truly social collaboration solution was in

the product record, itself. The result could reduce product cost and speed time to market by enabling real time

communication throughout the global supply chain.

Arena recently launched Arena Scribe, a unique, easy to use, secure, and flexible collaboration solution with a real time commenting page. No other PLM provider on the market has a social collaboration solution that integrates with the product record and aggregates a products permanent history of tribal knowledge. This is

important because product design is a dynamic process, driven by the collective input of a globally dispersed

supply chain team. The implications of enterprise social collaboration run deeper than knowledge sharing or quick

communication.

Within Scribe, the collaboration threads are updated real time in a familiar chat interface, so distributed teams

can discuss issues and concerns. Hot topics are kept visible with email and dashboard alerts. Scribe is part of

the product record and is always in context with Arena PLM. It permanently records your teams product design

communications like a virtual court reporter.

From a technical standpoint, Arena believes the first requirement for adoption is that the solution be completely intuitive for the user. A familiarity with popular desktop and Internet applications should be the only skills required.

With leading edged cloud-based platforms, a social networking and collaboration tool can be deployed in days,

returning tangible results in weeks. Alternatively, with licensed on-premise software, deployment alone can take

months, with payback deferred until well after a year.


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Final Notes:

A modern cloud-based PLM solution with an imbedded collaboration tool supports co-creation, shared value, and

a culture of collaboration that can be leveraged beyond the network. Social collaboration brings benefits that are best measured not by decontextualized statistics, but instead by the invaluable social impact of your employees

working together in a simple, immediate, and frictionless way to further tear down the barriers between personal

social networks and professional silos.

The broadcast generation from the industrial age is being

conjoined by a collaborative generation from the new

knowledge age. The old ways of staying within ones four walls

to solve problems in isolation are gone. The new generation is

educated, interactive, collaborative, and has grown up using

social network tools. And for companies eager to maximize

business results thats not just cool thats powerful.

Bibliography: 1) http://www.gartner.com/technology/it-glossary/#18_3

2) http://www.wikinomics.com/book/

3) http://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/faculty/uzzi/htm/

The value of an idealies in the using of it. Thomas Edison


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2013.06.27.cleantech.wp

About ArenaArena pioneered cloud PLM applications. The companys products

enable engineering, manufacturing teams and their extended supply

chains to speed prototyping, reduce scrap, lower cost and shrink

time to market. Arena cloud PLM applications simplify bill of materials

and change management for companies of all sizes, and offers the

right balance of flexibility and control at every point in the product

lifecyclefrom prototype to production. Based in Foster City, Calif.,

Arena has been ranked as a Top 10 PLM solution and also holds a

spot on the San Francisco Business Times Best Places to Work List

for 2013.

Contact

Arena Solutions

Foster City, CA 94404

P. 650.513.3500

F. 650.513.3511

Cloud. Connected. Content. Makes Making Easier.

Author

John Papageorge, the author of Next Generation

Collaboration, has worked with some of the biggest

names in technology, including Oracle, IBM, Hewlett

Packard, Cisco and Silicon Valley Bank, to analyze

and communicate emerging business and technology

trends.