For organizations that rely on a constant stream of innovation in products, services and delivery methods, collaborative technology clearly helps elicit those ideas and speed the process of implementing them. What we mean by responsiveness is not so much simply answering a customer's question within an hour or a day, but more so ensuring that a customer is able to anticipate and respond to an important event the crash of a stock market, or a new strike at a key supplier, or an announcement of a new product or price change by a major competitor. All of these need a rapid and effective response. Most organizations put together some kind of crisis management or war-room process, gathering the right people in a room and locking them in there until they come up with a plan of action. The more repeatable this process is, the more competitive it makes an organization.
Productivity is another strong area for collaboration.
Here we are talking about the ability for one person or team to create information with high content value and to store it in a way such that it is easy for other people and teams to find it and reuse it. By making it easy to reuse these so-called intellectual assets, an organization avoids recreating the wheel. By making this process systematic, some have been able to connect the dots within their organization so that it is easy to keep track of who does what around here. Last, competency refers to the ability to enhance the skills of employees technical skills, sales skills, managerial skills, etc. The interesting thing that Lotus discovered is that much of the training that goes on in any organization is peer education, or horizontal learning.