|
 |
| Our Services » Research » Completed Results |
Project CO: Collaborating with Ourselves
Achieving Operational Synergies
:: completed list main ::
Outside a corporation, marketplace and customer power set the rules - and increasingly dictate that businesses actively collaborate with one another. Within a corporation, however, such social rules do not necessarily prevail. Internal collaboration is often a prerequisite for effective external collaboration - and it is often more difficult to achieve. One might think that internal collaboration would be easier because business units pledge allegiance to the same corporation and often have implemented similar processes and technologies.
However, the major barriers to internal collaboration are organizational, managerial, and political. They have more to do with local loyalties than process design or systems implementation. It takes emphatic leadership, new accountabilities, and explicit programs of business and cultural change in order to accomplish the collaboration that ultimately benefits the corporation as a whole.
- Functional and organizational silos remain common. Most companies still operate in silos and lack the vision and value proposition to drive internal collaboration. Thus, money is being left on the table.
- Full process integration isn't always the best answer. The most extreme type of collaboration - full process integration across business units - is not always the most valuable or realistic approach. Many companies make the mistake of pursuing more process integration than customer requirements or business ambition really call for.
- Organizational structure need not change. Too many companies try to drive business change with organizational structure change, yet structure is a weak lever. No structure can be perfect for meeting all business demands, and the interesting problems and opportunities always seem to reside at the organizational boundaries - wherever they are drawn. It's more important to understand and adjust the operating and governance models.
- "Internal money" motivates bad decisions. When business units make decisions based entirely on internal P&L, with an eye toward corporate allocations and inter unit transfers, the resulting decisions are often sub-optimal for the corporation.
- Few companies reward collaboration. Most companies do not emphasize the "horizontal" performance measures that enforce collaboration, or reward people based on these measures. If people are rewarded for achieving business unit measures, then they make decisions for the better of the business unit, not necessarily the enterprise. There's no way around it.
- Drive the company via outcomes. Choosing the type, degree and focus of collaboration should start with a fundamental understanding of the business strategy. A critical success factor for collaboration is to understand the shared outcomes of the business units, whether it is around serving a market or delivering a product or service.
Re.sults® Project CO enables you to seize opportunities for cost reduction and performance improvement through cross-process and cross-organization collaboration, and in the process lay a better foundation for inter-corporate collaboration as well.
|
|
