For several years now, we have been witnessing the emergence of the collaborative platform concept almost everywhere. This tool is an IT solution that makes it possible to realize an old fantasy of the business world: collaborative work.
There is, however, a real gap between IT specialists and users: while the former know how to develop just about any feature on demand, most of the latter do not know how to answer this simple question: what tangible benefits can a collaborative work approach bring me, and is it worth the effort?
First of all, we must distinguish between two types of collaborative work: inter-company collaborative work, and collaboration between employees of the same company.
The latter is the best known, and to some extent, it is part of our daily lives: in companies, databases, shared directories, and other CRMs are nothing more than collaborative work tools for a specific use. These tools have been around for a long time and are entering a phase of maturity: even large corporations are starting to deploy “wikis” and “forums” on their intranets to encourage exchanges between employees and improve knowledge management.
Where, on the other hand, technical possibilities have far outpaced actual usage is in the field of inter-company relations and inter-company collaboration.
The reasons are simple: on the one hand, awareness of the need to encourage exchanges between companies is low, especially in Europe, and on the other hand, this approach no longer has anything to do with IT: it requires studying and thoroughly understanding interactions between companies, and then making available the tools (in this case a collaborative platform) that serve the common interest.
There are indeed multiple categories of inter-company relationships:
- The customer / supplier relationship
- The notion of partnership or cooperation
- Alliances or groups of companies
- Informal exchanges
- User / producer relationships
How can these relationships be developed with the help of a collaborative platform? What benefits can be expected from it? We will try to answer these questions throughout this blog.
