This combination of real-time and asynchronous features reflects the way people actually work. Typically people meet-face-to-face or via messaging and conference tools-to set goals, inform and establish and assign tasks, noted the report. To achieve optimal results, meetings and individual efforts should take place within a shared environment with common resources, business logic, documents and workflow.

Collaboration process

Locandro from CLP said his firm's efforts towards greater collaboration and knowledge have created processes comparable to BP, Siemens and Singapore Airlines-who represent leading best practice in knowledge-sharing and collaborative initiatives.

CLP has central data repositories for sharing of documents and images to aid engineering and maintenance work. The engineering department has invested significant effort in creating more knowledge sharing and collaboration with the use of portals, chat forums and shared resources. CLP uses these tools to help share techniques and advice among its staff, with processes that help codify user knowledge into reusable information by others.

In most cases, people initially engage in collaboration initiatives as a result of embarking on process automation exercises. As processes mature they reach a point where more collaboration is required between different parties within that process.