Does a Senior Exec Need to be in Charge of Enterprise Collaboration?

Jacob Morgan recently wrote an interesting post, Do Organizations Need a Chief Collaboration Officer? Whatever you decide to call this person, I think that there is a compelling argument that someone at a senior level needs to have his or her sole responsibility be to support collaboration across the enterprise. McKinsey has well documented the financial benefits of the connected enterprise and Jacob offering some strong arguments to support this role.

First, he notes that adding it to the responsibilities of a senior exec with an existing set of responsibilities will insure it will not get the right attention. Collaboration, by definition, needs to go across business units so this executive should be in position to do this and not be aligned with a particular group. At the same, time, as Jacob notes, the collaboration exec needs to work closely with other senior management, including the CIO, but also with each business unit lead, to ensure the necessary cross-fertilization within the enterprise.

Jacob offers a useful job definition for this role: “I imagine that prior to deployment this person would be in charge of things such as developing use cases, evaluating vendors, developing a strategy and roadmap, evaluating risks, and building a team (not having the CCO do this on his own).  After deployment this person would be focusing on thing such integration, training programs, adoption strategies and the like.  The long term role of this person would be scaling the program, fostering a collaborative culture, continuous evaluation and adoption, and integrating collaboration within the overall business strategy of the company.” 

I think the emphasis should be on the strategic. Jacob makes a very important point about not having this person doing the work on his or her own. I have seen too many senior level roles in a wide variety of verticals and horizontals created without the proper staff and budget. That approach is doomed to failure and a waste of time and money. In fact it is worse than nothing because it creates the illusion that collaboration is supported when it is only getting lip service.

Jacob argues against having CIOs lead collaboration because they already have too much on their plate and collaboration is more than technology. I would underscore the second point. In fact, I would argue that the CIO is last person to do this because it will be seen as a technology play when it is much more a business play. Certainly technology needs to play a role as I have written elsewhere (see Maybe Enterprise 2.0 Is About the Technology and Looking Deeper into Getting Social Business Right) but it needs to be a supporting role, and not leading the charge.

We also need to be careful and not go overboard in the other direction. As I wrote in the second post above, many people at recent conferences say, “it is not about the technology.”  I think this can be misleading because part of the change is within the technology and the IT department may be a major point of resistance. It is better to say, “it is more than the technology.” I think that is a subtle, but important distinction.

Jacob provides a useful list of pros and cons for a CCO. I will not repeat them here and recommend you read his original post. I do want to emphasis one of these points, the need to look at “collaboration from a holistic big picture of how it impacts everyone.” I remember being at senior staff meeting of a P&C insurance company in the early 90s that was in serious trouble. The new CEO, who had been brought into save the company, said that it was important to share content and insights across business units.  One leader for a vertical market asked why he needed to know what (another seemingly unrelated vertical market) is doing. The CEO looked at him and said that thinking is exactly what is wrong with this firm.  The CEO went on to support the notion of shared learning as a strategic initiative and it was one of several reasons the company got turned around. Whether you call the person a CCO or some other title, the organizations that put someone in charge of collaboration and give this person the budget and staff to do their job will be the winners in our ever connected markets. 

 

Comments

[Bartti]

I have had very interesting discussions about this topic lately and you (and Jacob) are right that to change an organization culture in to more social and collaborative, it needs leadership support to make this happen.

Whether an organization should appoint a collaboration officer depends a lot in what stage that organization is. It may be more effective to distribute leadership to people across the organization in stead of making one person responsible.

I am planning to write a blog post about this soon so stay tuned..

Bart Schrooten @ Lumo Research
www.lumoflow.com

[bill Ives]

Bart

Thanks. I look forward to your post. Bill

[Jacob]

Thanks for the follow up post Bill, I just shared it as you are always great at adding your own additional ideas and insights.

Jacob