Effective collaboration is vital for organizations to enhance their responsiveness, innovation, and economic performance. The document outlines how integrating new collaborative tools can improve results, reduce costs, and increase output through various forms of collaboration, from ad hoc to formal. It emphasizes the importance of cultural leadership and technology maturity for maximizing the returns on investment in collaboration technologies.

1. Effective collaboration
multiplies results
Marty Parker
Principal, UniComm Consulting
Co-Founder, UC Strategies

2. Introduction
Collaboration is a key business process for most organizations, whether large or
small, whether public or private sector. The importance of collaboration can be
visualized as recurring business processes that can be accelerated or enriched in
order to produce a return for the enterprise.
Use New Collaboration Solutions To:
Enrich Results: 2 Cycles Per Period Save Costs: 2 Cycles Per PeriodIncrease Output: 3 Cycles Per Period
Cycle 1 Cycle 2
Cycle 1 Cycle 2 SavingsCycle 1 Cycle 2 Cycle 3
Current: 2 Cycles Per Period
Cycle 1 Cycle 2
Use New Collaboration Solutions To:
Enrich Results: 2 Cycles Per Period Save Costs: 2 Cycles Per PeriodIncrease Output: 3 Cycles Per Period
Cycle 1 Cycle 2
Cycle 1 Cycle 2 SavingsCycle 1 Cycle 2 Cycle 3
Current: 2 Cycles Per Period
Cycle 1 Cycle 2
The enterprise, organization or department can choose, depending on their
priorities and situation, to apply the gains from improved collaboration to:
• Increase output or grow revenues by completing more cycles per
time period
• Enrich the content or quality of the results by enabling more diverse and
effective interactions
• Reduce costs simply by completing the required cycles more quickly
The choice of approaches may be consistent across the enterprise. Some
enterprises may use all three methods depending on the specific business
processes that are targeted for collaborative improvement.
Each of these choices produce positive outcomes that justify investment in the
new collaborative tools.
For most organizations effective collaboration is crucial to their success for two
major reasons:
• Collaborative processes are essential to the organization’s ability to respond
to customers, clients, citizens, and supply chain partners. If collaborative
processes are ineffective, the organization will be increasingly unresponsive
or uncompetitive. Conversely, if collaborative processes are highly
effective the organization will be resilient, innovative, responsive, and likely
economically effective (i.e. profitable in the private sector).
• Collaborative processes consume one of the most valuable assets in
most organizations -- the highly-trained and usually highly-compensated
knowledge workers, information workers, and senior management. Highly
effective collaborative processes can magnify the effectiveness of these
resources while also improving the organization’s economics through more
effective utilization of these valuable assets.
These two reasons can be positively supported by understanding collaborative
processes in terms of the types of collaborations that occur within an organization
and by identifying where within organizations’ value chains or business processes
these collaborative activities occur.
• By understanding the types of collaborations, the broad range of new
collaborative communication technologies can be applied most effectively
to those collaborative activities.
• By identifying where within organizations the collaborative activities
occur, the collaborative technologies can be applied in the context of
the workflows. In many cases the new collaborative technologies may
be integrated directly into the work environment of the collaborative
team, ranging from the design of physical spaces to the integration of
collaborative technologies into document repositories or business
software applications.

3. SMART Technologies Inspired Collaboration Assessment
To assist businesses in better understanding the role of collaborative technologies
in their organizations, for the past year SMART Technologies has offered an online
assessment tool known as SMART Inspired Collaboration Assessment (ICA)1
. To
date, approximately 1,500 businesses have used this survey to report the current
state of their collaborative technology deployment as well as the type and degree
of results they are achieving with that collaborative technology. Participation
provides feedback against the total population that can guide collaboration
strategies and tactics. This database of enterprise customer inputs is a valuable
and unique guide to understanding collaborative technology deployments and
results. A report titled, “Visual Collaboration Best Practices” that describes ICA
results is available2
.
This white paper will make reference to the Inspired Collaboration Assessment
at various points to illustrate the current state of adoption of collaborative
technologies and to highlight ways in which enterprises are experiencing the best
results from their investments.
1. This organizational self-assessment tool is available at SMARTTech.com/assessment42.
2. Visual Collaboration Best Practices: http://downloads01.smarttech.com/media/research/whitepapers/business_collaboration.pdf
Defining Collaborative Activities
Before exploring the types and organizational locations of collaborative activities,
it is worth differentiating collaborative activities from transaction-based activities.
There has been a trend among the communications technology vendors to label
any form of communication as collaborative. This is clearly not the case. For
example, an email, text or voice call to place an order for a specific product or
to check on the delivery schedule for that order is a transaction, the exchange
of specific known information, not a collaborative activity in which new ideas or
information are created through interaction or discussion.
By contrast, collaboration means an activity or process in which two or more
people work jointly, usually interactively and iteratively, to reach a common goal
or to produce a shared outcome. Collaboration usually includes sharing of
knowledge, learning by the participants, and building consensus. Understanding
the distinction of collaboration in contrast to transactions is very important to
identifying the opportunities for leverage of new collaborative technologies and to
focusing of the new collaborative technologies in the areas of highest return.

4. Types of Collaboration
There are a number of interesting characterizations of collaborative activities from
reputable sources. One taxonomy that has been very helpful was provided by
IBM in 2010 and describes collaboration as falling into three categories, Ad Hoc,
Activity Centric and Formal:
• Ad Hoc is collaboration that occurs at a moment of opportunity as one
person seeks advice, information, confirmation or network building with
another, usually in presence-based directories or social network settings.
Discussion of a sales strategy or validation of a technical analysis are
examples of ad hoc collaboration.
• Activity Centric collaboration focuses on the steps that occur in a business
activity, but on an episodic basis more than in a formal process. The
collaboration could take many forms, from a live conversation, to a blog
or wiki post, to a presence-driven IM or Group Chat. The consultation by
a development engineer with the product manager to clarify customer
preferences or the consultation by a lead attorney with particular legal
specialist while preparing for a contract or a case are examples of activity
centric collaboration.
• Formal collaboration is the implementation of a specific approach to
defining or designing or deciding on organizational directions, activities or
choices. Often this occurs in context of written procedures and is performed
via enterprise portals and embedded communications, delivering both
optimized and standardized workflows with self-documenting features for
compliance and audit purposes. HR hiring processes, health care physician
consultations and aircraft designs are examples of formal collaboration.
The structure of these three collaboration categories can be used as guidelines
for acquiring, deploying, and supporting the technologies to achieve the best
organizational collaborative outcomes.
SMART Technologies Characterizations
In the SMART Technologies ICA, collaborative technology deployments are
described in terms that relate easily and logically to the types of collaboration
outlined above. The ICA differentiates between informal and structured/formal
deployments.
Informal deployments are available for quick and easy access in support of Ad
Hoc and Activity Centric, collaborations and may be deployed in break rooms,
common areas, small huddle rooms and on the users’ PCs/Macs and other
personal devices.
Structured/formal deployments support more process-driven collaborations
including both Activity-Centric and Formal collaborations and are usually
configured in larger conference rooms or other specific work areas while also
allowing participation from the users’ PCs/Macs and other personal devices.
The ICA also includes a deployment category for Dispersed technology
deployment and recognition of the mobile and distributed nature of most
organizations and the need to include customers, clients, citizens, and supply
chain partners in some types of collaborative activities. Dispersed deployments
may relate to any of the three collaboration Categories.

5. Where Collaborative Activities Occur within Business Processes
Every organization can be understood in terms of a value chain3
by which
that organization creates and delivers its products or services to its intended
customers. It is both possible and useful to examine and enterprise’s value chain
to find the activities that are most dependent on successful collaboration since
that will determine the areas with the greatest potential for high return from
improvements in those collaborative activities. Examples are provided below for
two industries – Manufacturing and Professional Services.
Manufacturing
Effective collaboration can deliver high or very high ROI in these three value
chain categories:
Professional Services
Effective collaboration can deliver high or very high ROI in these three value
chain categories:
Product Design &
Development
The engine for future
revenues and growth.
Uses all 3 Collaboration
types.
Shortens product release
times by removing delays.
Improves product quality via
more, better insights.
Very high ROI both by
cutting dev. cycle time
and costs and by earning
revenue more quickly.
Marketing & Sales
High leverage for shares of
mind & market.
Ad Hoc & Activity-centric.
Speeds creation of
campaigns & proposals via
interaction with agencies,
customers, prospects.
High ROI from lower
campaign costs & from more
sales cycles and higher win
rates per period.
Managment & Planning
Effective organization &
direction of business.
Uses all 3 Collaboration
types.
Speeds and improves
planning, decision making,
approvals. Increases
effectiveness of feedback &
reviews.
High ROI from faster
response to change, more
agility vs. competition,
shorter project cycle times.
Client Relationships
Moves client service &
rapport to new levels.
Uses all 3 Collaboration
types.
Enriches interactions
at any time and place.
Increases engagement via
both software and room/
whiteboard tools.
High ROI from customer
satisfaction and Firm
differentiation. Rich
relationships drive
repeat business.
Services Production
Multiplies output of
professional staff.
Uses all 3 Collaboration
types, but esp. Formal.
Speeds completion
of projects, esp. multi-
discipline, consultative.
Shortens review cycles
while increasing quality.
High ROI by reducing
project completion
times, avoiding errors &
rework. Grow revenue
or reduce costs.
New Services &
Professional
Development
Creates new service offers,
new skills.
Activity-centric and Formal
Collaboration types.
Speeds design process
for new services; shortens
training of staff on new
offers, processses.
High ROI by more agile
response to markets,
clients, regulations. More
competitive at lower costs.
3. Porter, Michael E. (1985). Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance.

6. Similar analysis can be applied to any enterprise in any industry. The key points
of these examples are to show that (1) collaborative activities are focused in
specific areas of an enterprise, not uniformly distributed; and (2) the payoffs from
improvements in collaborative activities are significant and also differentiated
across the elements of the value chain.
These examples also make clear that the returns from improvements in
collaborative activities can be categorized into three broad groupings:
• Go Faster: Effective use of collaborative technologies can enable certain
business processes to be completed much more quickly thereby multiplying
the return on the human resources or other assets of the enterprise. This
was illustrated in the examples by faster time-to-market for new products
which multiplies the future revenue stream; by faster completion of sales
cycles to increase revenues and possibly margins; and by faster completion
of engagement definition, engagement execution, and new service
development in a professional services firm all of which will increase the
overall revenues as well as the cost to revenue ratios.
• Use Less: Effective use of collaborative technologies can enable certain
business processes to be completed with less resource usage or cost.
This may be done by more effective engagement of external resources; by
more effective interaction with customers, clients, citizens or supply chain
partners; by faster problem solving in production and service operations;
and by more efficient, yet more insightful and thorough, professional service
engagement completion.
• Be Better or Different: Effective use of collaborative technologies,
especially those for Ad Hoc and Activity Centric work is very likely to
improve the quality of the goods and services that an organization delivers
as well as stimulating and enabling differentiation through creativity and
innovation among the enterprise’s employees and broader ecosystem,
including customers.
The effect of these types of business process improvements usually results
in returns on investment exceeding the 100% per annum level, as illustrated by
a number of case studies available from SMART Technologies and others in
the industry.

7. Assuring Successful Collaboration
There is a lot of information available as a guide to successful collaboration within
an enterprise. The very comprehensive and industry thought-leading information
available from the SMART Technologies’ Inspired Collaboration Assessment (ICA)
is a very important source of such information guiding successful collaborative
technology investments and deployment. Here are some highlights of this report.
Collaboration Maturity Increases Returns.
As highlighted in the “Visual Collaboration Best Practices” reference above, the
reported level of business value increases dramatically from low to high or very
high when the collaborative technologies are delivered in environments that are
integrated (integrated with other communications systems and business software
tools) or collaborative (equipped with a variety of easily accessed and easily
used collaborative technologies designed for the users’ roles and activities) and/
or optimized (both integrated and collaborative plus thoroughly supported with
cultural leadership and pertinent training and information) environments.
As highlighted previously, since the leverage of effective collaboration,
i.e. collaboration maturity, is so high it is compelling to make the incremental
investment in collaborative technologies and the incremental investments
in integration, culture, and support that will drive those returns to
optimal levels.
Certain Technologies Correlate To Highest Returns
The ICA also captures the use of specific collaborative technologies which
allows the correlation of technology usage to maturity level. As of early 2014,
the enterprises who reported a more mature environment of collaborative or
optimized collaborative technologies also indicated that their use of the following
five technologies were higher than the enterprises at the unsupported level by the
significant percentages shown below.
Collaborative Technology % Of Increased Adoption
Conferencing administration software 39%
Team collaboration software 38%
Integrated whiteboards 37%
Conferencing software 33%
Social software 32%
Clearly, there is a benefit of providing the appropriate tools to support:
• Easy use of conferencing software
• Including software that supports team collaboration, such as project-specific
collaborative workspaces or similar tools, as was suggested in the Activity
Centric and/or Formal collaboration activities in the manufacturing and
professional services examples above
• Equipping the conferencing and team collaboration tools with interactive
environments specifically represented by integrated whiteboards, which
certainly should include touch sensitive creation and image manipulation in
combination with background application software
• Supplementing these environments with social software to facilitate the
Ad Hoc interactions in addition to the Activity Centric and Formal
collaborative activities.

8. Benefits Are Focused In Certain Roles
The ICA analysis of the responses also reported the top six categories of returns
from investments in collaborative technologies as shown below.
Areas Of Improvement % Reporting
Team productivity 73%
Problem solving 65%
Process cycle times 55%
Decision making 53%
Enhanced customer experience 53%
Information quality 52%
These results are well aligned with the areas of improvement within an enterprise
value chain as highlighted in the manufacturing and professional services industry
examples above.
Culture Is Key
Effective adoption of the collaborative technologies is critical to achieving and
magnifying the returns from an enterprise’s collaborative activities. Enterprises
that reported a high level of cultural leadership and adoption support for their
collaborative technology investments were more likely to report positive returns
from their investments at a rate that ranges from 63% to 130% greater than
average. Enterprises that reported in the bottom 10% of cultural leadership and
adoption support reported positive returns at a rate that is 16% to 27% lower than
average. Given the importance of the results that are influenced by effective
collaboration, this range of varying results between high performance and low
performance collaboration is a matter for serious management attention all
the way up to the C-Suite. Certainly other factors can influence an enterprise’s
overall performance, but this data indicates that successful cultural leadership
and adoption support for the appropriate level of investment in collaborative
technologies is probably one of the top levers for overall enterprise performance.

9. Collaboration Investments Are Compelling
Investment in any new technology will face many hurdles. Often there is no on-
going budget category to fund these new investments. Thus the new technology
will either have to be more compelling than other investment options, such as
a new conveyor line in manufacturing, or an increased travel and entertainment
budget for client development in professional services.
The analysis offered above and the feedback from hundreds of organizations
as shown in the “Visual Collaboration Best Practices” white paper indicate
that investments in the new advanced collaboration technologies will be very
compelling in two ways.
1. Hard ROI from Cost Savings and Business Growth
The manufacturing and professional services examples point directly to the
areas where costs can be reduced for almost all types of project-oriented
work. These savings will pay back the investments and operating costs of
collaboration technologies in high multiples.
For some firms and in some markets, the improvements in collaboration
speed and quality can be converted directly into revenue growth. In
business value chain elements such as product development, sales cycle
times, or professional services team capacity, cycle times can be measured
to provide proof of the increased capacity and revenue that result in the
very high, compelling, ROI.
• At the unsupported level, only 45% of participants reported value above
average, compared to other technology investments, while 16% reported
value below average, compared to other technology investments.
• At the integrated level of maturity, 72% reported value exceeding the
average, compared to other technology investments.
• At the highest levels of maturity, 90% reported value exceeding the average,
compared to other technology investments. Furthermore, 30% reported
value that significantly exceeded the average.
Unsupported
Below Average About Average Exeeds Average
Not Integrated
Integrated
Collaborative & Optimized
2. Comparative Feedback from Peer Organizations
The ICA report includes this graphic, showing that higher maturity levels of
collaborative technology deployment and support produce higher returns
than alternative technologies for 72% to 90% of the respondents.

10. Summary and Conclusions
Collaboration is a high-leverage business process for most enterprises. An
evaluation of the enterprise value chain will highlight the types of collaborative
activities within the enterprise. The evaluation can then inform identification,
selection, and prioritization of investments in collaborative technologies that
can multiply the returns to the enterprise in each of those areas of collaborative
activities. Given the business value – both economic and cultural – of
collaborative activities in most enterprises, attention to this analysis on an
ongoing basis is certainly warranted and essentially crucial to the organization.
The ongoing, cumulative SMART Technologies ICA survey is a very powerful tool
for confirming the value of investments in effective collaborative technologies.
The scope of this database is unique in the industry both as to its size, its
breadth of information, and its duration. It is hard to imagine an enterprise that
would not benefit by participating in the ICA and in spending time with the
SMART Technologies team to understand the implications of the assessment in
context of the individual enterprise’s business goals, business processes and
industry situation.