Enterprise Collaboration: The Big Payoff

Business is more than just transactions. Business is about trust, relationships, and delivering long-term, sustained value. Now that companies have adopted the web as a platform for basic transactions and communications, such as email, they are looking for the next step. How can companies deliver goods and services with greater speed, consistency, and quality? How can they tap into and leverage the combined intellectual capital of their employees, customers, and partners?

Collaboration: Just Do It

According to InformationWeek, the answer is collaboration. In its 2001 survey on Information Sharing and Collaboration, more than nine out of 10 business and IT executives indicated that collaboration—the sharing of business information within and across corporate organizations—will increase sales opportunities and about half say it will cut costs. In fact, the survey participants agreed that, “companies need to partner with suppliers and customers to develop the right products, find the right markets, and deliver goods on time without stockpiling huge inventories.”

To collaborate effectively, people work in large virtual teams, created quickly, spread around the world, and comprising colleagues, customers and partners. Working in these global team-based environments, people establish relationships that may be short-term project-focused or long-term and evolving over time. With each new relationship, companies invest in selecting the right people, learning how to work together, and determining how to extract the most value in terms of revenues and profits.

So, how do we measure the value of the relationships we build? The Harvard Business Review reports that a 5% increase in customer retention can result in a 25% to 95% increase in profits from that relationship. To maximize their return on relationship investments, companies are seeking ways to drive additional revenues and profits from existing relationships.

Industry experts and business executives assert collaboration, the sharing of information across a broadly connected world, from suppliers to producers to customers to the customers’ customers, is a key enabler to react more quickly to changes in supply and demand. The Gartner Group claims that, “By 2005, your enterprise will be collaborative ... or it won’t exist at all.” We know you want to thrive in the new economy. The question is: where should you begin?

Enterprise Collaboration: The Technology Breakthrough

Sure you can spend time integrating your back-end systems and linking them with your partners to gain greater efficiencies. You can even use portals and content management systems to efficiently distribute information across your enterprise. However, according to the Gartner Group, 80% of a company’s useful knowledge is unstructured information, residing in email, on desktops, in internally generated documents, on pages pulled off the web and in human-readable reports generated by enterprise applications. To what extent are you optimizing your use of this human-centric knowledge?

As companies work together, they generate mountains of unstructured information that is tough to synthesize in one company and next to impossible to synthesize between multiple companies. Fortunately we are no longer constrained by traditional database tools. Enterprise collaboration solutions now enable companies to mine and refine the golden 80% of the person-to-person knowledge that most enterprise systems leave in information silos.

An effective enterprise collaboration solution must provide a technical means for people to:

• Work together on large, distributed, cross-organizational teams;

• Effectively communicate across distance, time zones, and company borders;

• Develop and sustain relationships with colleagues, partners, and customers;

• Create, gather, and manage unstructured and semi-structured information;

• Discuss, analyze, review and approve this information collaboratively;

• Discover and reuse the prior work of people in the extended enterprise;

• Learn on the job from peers and from organizational practices and methods;

• Be available from anywhere—wired or wireless—at any time through a browser;

• Grow smarter and add more value every day as they refine and reuse knowledge;

• Be technically agnostic, using any database, in any server environment, with any browser, on any email client, scaling interactions across any enterprise;

• Leverage open standards to hook into best-of-breed solutions elsewhere in the company’s enterprise network.;

Intraspect Powers Enterprise Collaboration

Intraspect provides an environment where people collaborate, using email and web-based workspaces, to manage business relationships, share information and coordinate work. Simply put, Intraspect creates a single place where people do their collaborative work more effectively and thereby extract the greatest value from their critical business relationships. Intraspect’s enterprise collaboration applications offer four essential capabilities:

• Web-Based Workspaces that provide a place to work with other people—sharing information, coordinating work, and accessing information in the context of their work. A large virtual community has many workspaces, both personal and shared, and all workspaces are part of a unified “group memory” of online work.;

• Many-to-Many Collaboration technology to enable employees, customers, partners and suppliers to work independently or in teams without having to know each other’s information needs, expertise, access authorization or work roles. Groups of people use event and topic subscription, push and pull notification, role-based access and workflow to work together in intranets and extranets.;

• Enterprise Knowledge Base captures the results of online work for easy learning and reuse. The information is collected at its point of creation in its original business context. Users can simply email documents they want to share to a unique address assigned to the workspace.;

• Enterprise Integration ensures the web-based workspaces link directly with the transactions on which they are based. Using open standards, companies link structured information such as sales forecast data directly with unstructured information like proposal versions and contract negotiations. These integrations provide a single place for managing critical business relationships.;

Intraspect in Action at J.P. Morgan Chase & Co.

When J.P. Morgan & Co. launched LabMorgan, a separate business unit that invests in companies that web-enable financial services, it also created DeepThought, a knowledge collaboration application built by Intraspect Software. DeepThought helps partners make sound business plan investment decisions. DeepThought already has 3,000 LabMorgan partners, directors and employees on the system in five countries and is expanding access to include market research, asset management, and investment banking activities across J.P. Morgan Chase & Co.

Using DeepThought, partners can quickly identify the experts within LabMorgan who know the most about each new idea, instantly find previously created knowledge, and track each project at every stage. With DeepThought, the review and distribution of information is more efficient than storing and accessing it in shared folders or by individual email accounts, and it’s much less structured than a traditional database, making it easier to search across multiple types of data.

“We chose Intraspect because of their commitment to building a collaborative environment that we could customize to the unique requirements of our business. Based on their world class functionality, we have been able to build advanced collaborative applications to manage and run our business,” claims Jeanne Feldhusen, Managing Director at LabMorgan.

Separately, Investment Bank CTO Michael Ashworth is leveraging knowledge collaboration to align the organization after the recent merger that brought together J.P. Morgan and Chase. Leveraging a blend of in-house development efforts and software from Intraspect Software, Epicentric, and Vignette, Ashworth and his team are developing an internal company portal to integrate employee resources and activities.

“Our merger situation leads us to a place where much of our resources and information are in independent buckets and our challenge is to bring it together,” Ashworth says. Incorporating knowledge management elements into employee portals and using content management to tie it all together allows J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. to pour large amounts of data into an internal holding area and serve it out to different portals through inquiries. “The productivity improvement gained because you can snap to an answer quickly is very valuable for us in terms of time to market and pure dollars,” Ashworth says.

Smart Decisions Yield High Return on Investment

Research indicates that employees can only learn, embrace, and integrate one new application per year into their existing work habits. If you can only choose one application to add to their suite this year, don’t you want to select the solution that leverages their existing work habits and drives value directly to your customers?

We agree that enterprise solutions need to be easy to use to ensure rapid adoption and rapid return on your investment. We know collaboration doesn’t always come naturally. That’s why Intraspect works the way people work—using email and a browser interface—and links directly with structured enterprise systems your employees already use. Ted Graham claims Hill & Knowlton account managers win new business 33% faster using Intraspect workspaces because, “they are easy to use, requiring scant technical know-how.”

With enterprise collaboration solutions from Intraspect, companies achieve a level of relationship intimacy with their clients and partners that far exceeds the relationships built by individual account representatives. Let’s face it, deeper relationships yield higher returns.

As of June 2001, 35% of the Global 50 companies, including General Motors, Hitachi, Siemens, SBC Communications, and Boeing, are using Intraspect to collaborate internally or with their business partners. They want to own the most valuable information about their customers and competitors in a single collaborative workspace. So, don’t listen to us, listen to them. Are you ready to extract the greatest value from your business relationships?