Collaboration Will Drive the Next Wave of Productivity Gains

Increasing productivity — making more with less — is at the core of any company or any economy's economic progress. From a societal view, productivity drives higher living standards and increases shared resources — for example, providing a government with more resources to invest back into its citizens. For a company, increasing productivity has the same result — increasing profitability that can either be used to increase the wealth of employees and shareholders or invest back into the future of the organization.

The logic behind productivity improvements is straightforward: make more and/or use less. Making more can include increasing the volume produced (making more units) or increasing the value produced (making units that sell for more). The ways individual companies achieve these straightforward goals fall in two basic categories: developing and adopting new management practices (such as total quality management, lean manufacturing, reengineering, and employee engagement), or adopting new technology and integrating it into the way work is done. Although both categories are valuable, historically, technology adoption has been the more important determinant of longer-term productivity growth.

But there's a catch. Technology adoption only improves productivity if it is accompanied by concurrent changes in the way work is done. For example, there was a substantial increase in productivity during the twenty-year stretch from 1980 to 2000, fueled by companies' investments in enterprise-wide information technology. However, research on the returns generated by these investments found that productivity growth occurred only when the technology was accompanied by thoughtful business process innovations tailored to sector- and company-specific business processes. In fact, technology adoption alone, without the accompanying changes in work practices, had little or even a negative impact on productivity.

Today, a new wave of technologies — collaborative or social technologies, most of which appeared only within the last decade — is entering the workplace. But as with the technology of the 1980s and 1990s, the ability of these technologies to drive real productivity growth will depend on whether or not they are accompanied by thoughtful changes in the way work is done.

These new technologies hold out the promise of many business benefits. They greatly amplify our abilities to interact simultaneously with large numbers of people. As they make their way from use in our personal lives into the workplace, they offer the promise of significant improvements in generating, capturing, and sharing knowledge, finding helpful colleagues and information, tapping into new sources of innovation and expertise, and harnessing the "wisdom of crowds." Collaborative technologies have the potential to shift the way we interact with people on our teams, find external expertise when it's needed, and share ideas and observations more broadly.

Some of these types of collaboration will be critically important factors for future success in some industries and not important at all in others. The ways in which collaborative technologies will contribute to productivity will vary by industry sector and organization. Slightly different implementation designs will be required — for the technology itself, as well as for the adoption and use strategies. Understanding exactly which forms of collaboration will have the greatest impact on your business and how to re-think existing practices to leverage these new capabilities will be critically important to realizing the returns they promise.

The frontier of human productive capacity today is the power of extended collaboration — the ability to work together beyond the scope of small groups. Today's technologies have the potential to enable a very different level of business performance, but only when accompanied by a thoughtful redesign of the way your business is done.