If you thought you were doing well on collaboration, think again. We have now entered the age of extreme collaboration.
Effective collaboration in the supply chain is hardly a trivial thing – bringing new levels of confidence and trust to business relations.
But, extreme collaboration (XC) is to collaboration what bungee jumping is to a walk in the park.
The concept has its genesis in the ICT function, and, according to Gartner: “XC is enabled by combining four nexus forces into a pattern that can dramatically innovate the way people behave, communicate, work together and maintain relationships — often across wide organisational and geographic boundaries — to collectively deliver breakthrough process performance.”
It describes an extreme collaboration environment as a “virtual war-room” where people can come together to work collaboratively on a shared purpose. “What makes it extreme is people’s willingness to cross geographic, organisation, political, management boundaries to pool their collective skills and resources to solve problems and move towards the attainment of a shared, ambitious goal.”
It highlights the use of virtual web-based collaboration spaces in people’s daily jobs, as well as exploiting the value of near-real-time communication addiction (eg texting and tweeting) and the use of crowd-sourcing and social media tools.
And Gartner argues that today’s dominant performance management methods are ineffective for process-centric organisations so there needs to be a move to a system that encourages collaboration.
In addition, it says, companies need to use social network analysis to measure collaborative behaviour. It also recommends planning group events to kick start real-time communications and collaboration.
The question is of course, is your organisation ready to engage in extreme collaboration?
