Preparing
for Conversation with Elizabeth Lank
Cross-Organizational
Collaboration - All Shapes and Sizes
Elizabeth Lank
Independent
Specialist, Collaborative Working
Ascot, Berks, U.K.
 Introduction
Elizabeth Lank's
name has been popping up regularly in KM literature for many
years but it took my colleague and Inside Knowledge (IK)
editor Graeme Burton to bring us together. His February 2006
IK report with Elizabeth focuses on collaboration with
external organizations, but during this Dialogue Elizabeth wants
to use a broader brush, comparing and contrasting internal collaboration
with external. Please welcome Elizabeth Lank who has just joined
AOK as a member and begins her journey in the role of STAR Series
moderator.
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Biography
Elizabeth Lank is
an independent specialist who works with public, private and
voluntary sector organisations to help them improve efficiency
and effectiveness through greater cross-boundary collaboration
and knowledge sharing. Based in the U.K., she has recently published
a new book on collaborative working across different organisations,
entitled Collaborative
Advantage: How Organizations Win by Working Together
(Palgrave Macmillan 2006).
Examples of typical
leadership challenges she has helped to address include:
- How can we make
cross-boundary working effective - both within and across organisations?
- How do we get better
at sharing good practices without coming up against the 'Not
Invented Here' syndrome?
- How do we eliminate
the organisational 'silos' that often lead to expensive reinvention
of the wheel?
- How can we 'know
what we know' and put that knowledge to work to achieve our goals?
After completing
the INSEAD MBA degree in 1986, Elizabeth joined I.T. services
company ICL (now Fujitsu Services) and held a number of strategic
organisational development, management development and internal
communication roles (including leading ICL's Mobilising Knowledge
programme for five years) before setting up her own business
in January 2001. She spent the early part of her career working
for the European headquarters of an American computer company
in Geneva, Switzerland. A Canadian by birth, she graduated cum
laude from Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts in 1980.
Elizabeth is co-author
of the book, The Power of Learning - A Guide to Gaining Competitive
Advantage (IPD 1994), written as a practitioner's guide to
building 'learning organisations'. She has published a number
of articles on collaborative working and knowledge management
and collaborated with Amin Rajan on the research report, 'Good
Practices in Knowledge Creation and Exchange' (CREATE 1998).
She is a member of the international editorial boards of the
Journal of Change Management and Knowledge Management Review.
Elizabeth is an expert evaluator for the European Commission's
Directorate General for Information Society. She is a Faculty
Associate at the Institut d'Administration des Entreprises (IAE)
in Aix-en-Provence and has been a visiting lecturer on the U.K.
government's Cabinet Office Top Management Programme, at INSEAD,
London Business School, Henley Management College and Solvay
Business School in Brussels, as well as a regular speaker and
facilitator at public and in-company management conferences.
Contact details:
elizabeth.lank@think.plus.com
tel/fax +44 (0)1344 626142
www.think.plus.com
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Pre-dialogue
food for thought
Having majored in
cultural anthropology at college, I think I have always had an
appreciation for the natural tendency of human beings to be tribal
- to want to belong and to have their identity bound up with
one or more groups of people. There are many positive aspects
to this human trait but it can also reinforce barriers between
people, especially when you consider the lives that people lead
within organizations. There the tribes are business units, country
operations, functions or project teams - which is fine as long
as people's loyalties and energies are only needed within one
unit. However, as those of us championing collaboration and knowledge-sharing
are well aware, nothing gets done anymore without the involvement
of several organizational tribes! So individuals need to learn
to shift their mental picture of where they belong from a single
affiliation to a multitude of groups, depending on their business
priorities at the time. Some people are better at this than others!
Over the last ten
or fifteen years I have focused on this challenge of helping
organizations connect their silos (to mix some metaphors!), which
of course boils down to helping people connect and collaborate.
In the last couple of years I have become increasingly interested
in the additional challenges posed by cross-organizational working.
There is plenty of research to indicate that external collaboration
is an increasingly prominent feature of organizational life -
yet there is also plenty of research to show that many alliances,
joint ventures and other forms of collaboration go badly wrong
and end up not achieving the desired outcomes. So the dialogue
I would be very interested in having - and I hope you will be
too - would center around questions like:
- What are the similarities
and differences between internal and external collaboration?
- What are the roles
and capabilities needed within organizations to enable them to
collaborate effectively, both internally and externally? How
do you develop these roles and capabilities?
- What are the particular
leadership skills needed in a collaborative setting and how do
they differ (if they do) from traditional line management?
- How might the knowledge
champions who have been helping organizations to connect internally
get involved in helping them to connect with external partners?
As ever I am always
interested in the nitty-gritty practicalities of how things get
done -so sharing some real life stories from our collective experience
of collaborative working would be very valuable too. I look forward
to our conversations.
Elizabeth
Lank
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Cross-border
collaboration
Cover Story:
Inside
Knowledge, Volume 9, Issue 5, February, 2006
(Copyright
permission granted to AOK. No part of this article may be reprinted
without the express written permission of Inside Knowledge
magazine.)
Collaborating
with other organisations is key to many businesses, but two-thirds
are considered failures. What can be done to make collaboration
more successful?
By Graeme Burton
When European aircraft
manufacturer Airbus Industrie started work on the mammoth A380
'super-jumbo', it realised that it would need the help of engineering
companies from all over the world if the aircraft were ever to
take to the skies. Quite simply, the A380 was several orders
of magnitude greater than any project that it had ever undertaken
before, but it did not have the resources in-house to design
and build every component itself.
The answer for Airbus
was to construct a network of designers and suppliers in places
as diverse as China, India, Australia and even Washington State
- in the backyard of its great US rival Boeing. Its army of thousands,
designing and building parts, both large and small, soon straddled
the globe.
For such a gargantuan
project, engineers could not collaborate by sending their designs
in the post or by e-mail. Airbus needed a collaboration strategy
that balanced its need to share design details with partners
so that it could work with them on innovative new component designs,
with a recognition of the security risks inherent in such modes
of working.
Of course, such
collaboration between companies is not new. What is new is the
increasing scale of such partnerships and the rising number of
organisations that are engaging in such arrangements. At the
same time, what is also lacking is clear guidance and best practice
to help make sure that such relationships are conducted securely
and to the benefit of all partners.
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Collaborative
imperative
According to Elizabeth
Lank, knowledge-management academic and author of the book, Collaborative
Advantage,* there are eight main 'types' of collaboration:
- To conduct better
quality research, often in collaboration with academia. In the
European Union, the European Commission (EC) funds a number of
projects that can involve a variety of different companies, again,
often in conjunction with academia;
- To influence legislative
or standards-setting bodies;
- To win business
- because they stand a better chance of winning deals by collaborating.
If an organisation is missing a set of skills, it can find a
partner to mitigate that and, working together, they will both
have a better chance of winning the business;
- Collaborating in
order to develop products and services, such as car manufacturers
with their suppliers;
- Collaborating in
order to deliver products and services, such as retail chains
with banks to deliver credit facilities to customers;
- People and companies
collaborating to learn from each other. For example, in so-called
benchmarking clubs where organisations collaborate to share performance
data;
- 'Forced' collaboration.
"A client might say to a consultancy, 'I will hire you,
but you have to collaborate with McKinsey on this one because
we are working with them already'," says Lank;
- Collaborating to
save costs.
Today, virtually
all organisations collaborate, although in many it will be at
a more informal level - perhaps even off of the radar screen
of senior managers. "I challenge you to find any organisation
that isn't collaborating with someone," says Lank. "It's
so prevalent, whether it's public or private sector, and it's
called so many different things - partnerships or alliances.
But everyone is doing it in some shape or form."
Yet, despite its
widespread nature - and the increased deployment of specialist
tools to support collaboration - Lank also indicates that up
to 70 percent of such partnerships either fail outright or struggle
to deliver the anticipated benefits.
The reason for that
is manifold. In some cases, there is a lack of organisation,
particularly in terms of allocating roles and responsibilities,
and important work does not get done. In other cases, organisations
are over-prescriptive and can put together excessively rigid
structures that cannot adapt to changing demands.
Indeed, this is
especially true if the collaboration is bound from the beginning
in long and prescriptive legal documents. Every change in the
relationship may therefore require the intervention of teams
of lawyers on all sides, reducing flexibility and increasing
costs.
Frequently, too,
collaboration is simply regarded as 'a good thing' and organisations
rush into collaborative relationships too quickly, without thinking
through properly how it will work, their main purpose and the
resources and sheer hard work that they will require to ensure
a successful outcome.
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Best practice
However, there are
a number of best practice recommendations that Lank suggests
can maximise the chances of success.
First, she says,
start with a small, pilot project before making a commitment
to a major venture. This will establish relationships between
staff at the respective organisations and enable the company
to assess both the suitability of the organisation and its employees
in a 'live' scenario. Trust - a vitally important factor - can
be built up between participants at the same time.
Indeed, trust -
along with 'cultural compatibility' - are two of the key success
factors. That is to say, if the collaborators share similar values
and can be confident that the project will bring fair rewards
to all participants, they will have a greater chance of making
their collaboration work.
If there is sufficient
trust between the partners, then the inevitable and unexpected
surprises that occur can more easily be dealt with. Building
a partnership includes keeping it fair, says Lank, even when
circumstances simply change to the benefit of one or more of
the participants at the cost of others. If one or more participant
feels that they are not getting a fair deal, that will breed
resentment and distrust, however equitable the original agreement
may have been.
Governance is also
important, but getting the balance right between formal and informal
is critical - and very difficult to achieve. "The main message
from people involved in different collaborative relationships
is to be cautious about being too formal and structured about
everything," advises Lank. Collaborations succeed or fail
as a result of the relationships between the individual participants
and involving too many lawyers, too early, indicates a lack of
trust and will reduce flexibility.
"Sometimes,
the best structure involves a framework agreement, but you don't
always need to be tied down with penalty clauses. I think there's
a business culture in many organisations that doesn't trust partnerships.
Therefore, people in those companies have the idea that they
must protect themselves by bringing in the lawyers," says
Lank.
"Of course,
organisations need clarity on what they are trying to do, who
does what and, of course, everything has to be documented. But
the main lesson seems to be that if you build the right relationships,
you don't necessarily have to go down this hugely contractual
route," she concludes.
Greater formality
can be introduced at a later stage, as the collaboration gets
closer to bearing fruit. If important matters are decided at
too early a stage, that will stifle development.
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Packaged software
Increasingly, companies
are deploying collaborative software and other tools to help
facilitate their employees' collaborative relationships with
other organisations. Such tools can enable disparate groups of
people to video conference, share ideas and work interactively
online in real-time, instant message each other and so on.
Increasingly, such
software is being sold as integrated suites, enabling all the
information relating to a particular project to be captured at
the same time.
However, while the
vendors of packaged software like to give the impression that
their collaborative tools can be turned to virtually any project,
not all prospective customers are so sure.
Dr Siegfried Schmitt,
quality director of global IT at GE Healthcare, one of the world's
biggest producers of medical imaging systems, suggests that packaged
software cannot handle the proprietary file formats and other
specialist demands of GE Healthcare's technical collaborations.
GE Healthcare's
collaborative relationships include work with hospitals, universities
and other research institutions to refine the quality of the
company's ultrasound machines and CT scanners, which are used
in hospitals to diagnose a range of medical conditions. "We
sell our scanners to hospitals and only through the feedback
from the medical doctors do we learn more about how we can improve
these systems," says Schmitt. "We use various tools
to support that, typically research and development software
tools, but also communication tools."
Providing access
to the GE Healthcare intranet is not an option either because
of the wide range of people in different organisations that would
require access and the security implications involved. In some
instances - as observed by Lank - GE Healthcare is involved in
EC-sponsored research in collaboration with non-profit research
organisations. In these cases, GE Healthcare is able to use collaboration
tools and networks provided to these non-profit organisations
by the EC.
But the software
tools it uses for most of its technical collaboration has to
be bespoke, says Schmitt. "We can't use many of the existing
tools on the market. It's not just because the files are bespoke
in format, they are also very, very large," he says.
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Inside out
Nevertheless, the
collaborative tools market is quickly changing, says Gartner
analyst Betsy Burton. Until recently, she says, the collaboration
software market was largely focused on individual point tools.
That is to say, vendors used to sell standalone instant messaging
or stand-alone web-conferencing tools, for example.
Increasingly, however,
the major vendors, such as EMC Software, are rolling out integrated
tools that offer the benefit of being able to store all the 'collaborations'
related to a particular project - all the shared files, conferencing
communications, e-mails and instant messages - in one place.
This offers much quicker search and retrieval, enabling everyone
involved to keep track of designs, plans and decisions more easily.
"Gartner believes
a market is emerging, the integrated collaboration market, which
includes software products whose primary purpose is to support
a broad set of collaborative activities between any internal
or external users," says Burton.
But at the moment,
these tools are deployed and used at only a minority of organisations.
Indeed, Finland Post Corporation is typical. It currently lacks
any specialist collaborative software support and cannot yet
even offer staff guidance on business processes and best practices.
"We are just
writing our policies about collaborating inside our company and
with other organisations. [But at the moment], we don't have
any corporate-level instructions or tools to communicate with
other organisations. Usually we use e-mail," says Marko
Mikkola, a project manager at Finland Post.
It is a similar
story in the UK local government sector, says Ciara Shimidzu,
a corporate information manager at London's Bromley Borough Council.
Local government
in the UK has invested a great deal in IT systems in the past
five years, but largely to comply with some tough legislative
and regulatory demands from central government - particularly
to meet the Freedom of Information Act and to implement electronic
social care records software.
Implementing collaborative
tools has, therefore, taken second place to installing systems
to meet these regulatory demands, says Shimidzu.
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Double-edged
sword
But collaboration,
particularly when automated software tools and connections between
corporate networks are involved, can be a double-edged sword.
On the one hand, for example, aircraft manufacturers such as
Airbus and Boeing could scarcely function without close relationships
with suppliers. However, at the same time, they must closely
guard their technology for fear of industrial espionage and the
loss of almost priceless intellectual property.
At Airbus, this
risk is mitigated by demanding that partners meet certain minimum
standards of security - and those standards are enforced by a
rigorous in-house auditing function staffed by specialists who
fly around the world to inspect the security of suppliers.
These suppliers
are categorised according to the auditor's reports, with laggards
told to improve their security. The more secure they are, the
more access to Airbus's systems they will enjoy. That means not
just securing their network appropriately and employing the correct
tools - firewalls and anti-virus software, for example - but
ensuring that sensitive Airbus information is also tightly secured
within the organisation.
This is an important
point: one of the most serious shortcomings Airbus auditors uncovered
was a remote-access server physically connected to a partner's
network, feeding data back to a competitor. Many companies, they
have found, fail to physically secure their computers as well
- almost anyone can walk into their data centre.
Airbus is not alone.
Its great rival Boeing operates a similarly robust regime and
it has become de rigueur among major US investment banks
- and some in the UK, such as the Alliance and Leicester. Most,
however, prefer to keep the security aspect of their collaborative
relationships under wraps.
Outside such sensitive
sectors as aircraft and banking, organisations will typically
establish a set of security policies and procedures that the
technical side of their collaborations will need to adhere to,
focusing on their own systems rather than anyone else's. "We
have our own internal security standards and they require that
whenever we 'do' collaborative activities, we set up a specific
environment," says Schmitt.
In short, the collaboration
technology they use must not be allowed to open a 'back door'
into GE's wider computer systems and the activity must adhere
to certain standards. The system, "is also reviewed by the
security team," Schmitt adds, to ensure that it meets those
standards.
Furthermore, while
Schmitt is less mistrustful of the security risks posed by collaborative
partners than the major aircraft manufacturers, he is still wary
of certain weak links. "Some organisations we deal with
are less thorough in terms of what goes on their network,"
says Schmitt.
Universities, for
example, with which GE Healthcare collaborates closely on the
development of medical-imaging technology, have a constantly
shifting population of students, many of them highly computer
literate. But equally, if anecdotal evidence is any guide, they
are also more susceptible than many organisations to embarrassing
security lapses. "We wouldn't expect them to have as good
back-up and disaster-recovery regimes as we would require for
our own systems either," says Schmitt.
Besides, the kinds
of relationships - and power - that big manufacturers such as
Airbus and Boeing enjoy with their suppliers enables them to
firmly lay down rules for doing business with them. In more co-operative
(or equal) collaborative relationships, that is not so easy to
do.
Security, nevertheless,
remains a key factor in any collaborative relationship, because
the biggest determinant of success or failure is simply trust.
"It's not the contracts, it's not the structures. From all
the research that I have done, I would say that it is actually
either that the working relationships between people never get
set up properly or, at some point, the trust is broken,"
says Lank. "It seems to be down to personal relationships
in one way or another."
One of her key recommendations,
therefore, is that at the start of a collaborative relationship
between two companies, the people behind it should meet up and
discuss the issues face-to-face, not online or over the phone
- with, perhaps, a beer or two in the evening to ease the future
working relationships.
That, at least,
should be something that everyone can agree upon without the
need for a formal legal agreement.
*Elizabeth Lank's
Collaborative Advantage: How Organizations Win by Working Together
is published by Palgrave Macmillan. The book will be reviewed
in the March issue of Inside Knowledge.
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Box: Real-time
imperatives
Real-time collaboration
tools, such as instant messaging (IM) or video conferencing,
will yield the most value when integrated with asynchronous tools,
such as e-mail, and with business processes. That is a complex
task, but Lou Latham of the Gartner Group offers the following
recommendations:
- Survey users to
see how they collaborate in support of business processes. For
example, does a team need to interact more, or does it mainly
collaborate around documents? Does the team engage in standardised
processes or do ad hoc processes work? Use this information
to set your goals for real-time collaboration;
- Choose collaboration
tools that support the goals and functions of each team and match
them to the tasks they must perform. Buy the type of collaboration
tool that uses the least amount of bandwidth and resources to
get the job done;
- Look for collaboration
tools that do not conflict with each other. Try to leverage systems
that are already in place instead of duplicating functions;
- Mix and match real-time
and asynchronous tools to support various kinds of interactions.
Don't focus on generic collaboration suites alone, however broad
their functions. Important processes will require users to tap
domain-specific applications as well, such as customer-relationship
management. Content and processes must reach users wherever they
are, so your collaboration environment should support multiple
devices, both mobile and desktop, and should provide for alerts
to bring key personnel into the process when needed;
- Look for opportunities
to exploit presence awareness where it fits with your company's
culture. Start with easy-to-use, high-value, internal IM applications.
Don't rely on consumer IM services; deploy an enterprise IM application
behind the firewall. Then, extend presence awareness beyond messaging.
Link
Collaborative
Advantage: How Organizations Win by Working Together (Palgrave Macmillan 2006)
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