Solving real problems

I often ask myself - what is collaboration ?

From Wikipedia " Collaboration is a recursive process where two or more people or organizations work together in an intersection of common goals.." and " Collaborative software is software designed to help people involved in a common task achieve their goals."

So it's clearly about achieving a goal, then.

If I look around at the sea of solutions out there, there are many "collaboration tools", but they mostly seem to concentrate on the basic "share, communicate, interact" metaphor.

But enterprises are focused on goals. I was talking to a passionate Twiki user and valued friend of Twiki, David Pontzer, the other day. David is a Senior Process Engineering Manager, R&D at Mars, Inc. He puts it best- "It is my experience that a true competitive advantage comes from not just getting the tool that everyone can get and use. No advantage there, just keeping up. An advantage can be built by taking a look at how these tools can be customized and supercharged to facilitate your particular ways of working, culture, business, etc. This is where the Twiki solution is strongest. It is cost-effective, flexible, and powerful." A $30 billion global food company (like my kids and me you probably love Dove, M&Ms, Snickers...), gains a competitive advantage by using Twiki to automate many business patterns.

I visited another customer recently, Alps. A $100m Global drinking water solutions company. They use Twiki to automate their order processing with a Twiki application, and collaborate across continents. When I spoke with them, they were not focused on using the buzz words collaboration, enterprise 2.0, social software. They were singularly focused on their business goal. They did tell me that they moved racks of file cabinets down into the basement after they deployed Twiki, and they haven't been down there since.

Achieving goals. With Twiki applications to automate common business patterns like Project Management, CRM, Sales Pipeline tracking, Document management, IT operations, that's exactly what we can help businesses with. And the applications can be easily molded to your own business. And you can easily build your own. (Of course, Enterprise social networking, blogs, forums, all those E2.0 features are included.)

Collaboration defined.

2009-09-30 | Milind Pansare | Category Case Studies