Enterprise Networks
"In nearly every company, 70-90% of IT takes the form of basic undifferentiated infrastructure." - Nick CarrT
CollabWorks defines Collabsourcing™ as the intersection of social networking (trust building relationships) and sourcing (the optimization of resources). With so many problems repeated there is ample opportunity to identify Collabsourcing projects.
Ripe areas for collaboration include: sharing of expertise; sharing resources such as program management or application testing; sharing requirements and project efforts; dividing the cost of consulting, non-recurring, and vendor evaluations; and sharing solutions that work from code to best practices. Just two companies working together to solve a problem can save 40% or more.
There are three levels of Enterprise participation - Community, Network, and Forum. Community participation is free except that we ask members to contribute IP in the form of best practices, scripts, code, etc. that would be valued by other members. As a community member you participate in our collaborative environment where needs, issues, and solutions can be posted and socialized in a full Web 2.0 collaborative suite. In addition to those services provides Community members, Network members agree to pay a modest annual fee and to dedicate a collabsource focal point who will spend 1-2 hours per month working with CollabWorks and other Network members to identify collabsource opportunities and mash-up those interests with other members. Network members participate in CollabWorks sponsored virtual and real events designed to foster collabsourcing opportunities.
Forum members receive Network member services and participate in a legal subsidiary of CollabWorks. Each Forum is composed of 20-40 Enterprise participants who define the rules for governing project activity and IP distribution. Forums can be organized by type or size of entity, by location, and can be an extension of existing groups such as CIO roundtables. Within the Forum, projects are managed by CollabWorks Network Leaders. Projects are where Enterprise members consolidate requirements and drive deliverables to meet important needs of each participant. Suppliers are invited into project by Forum members. However, a supplier cannot be member of the same Forum as their customers.
Benefits of collabsourcing include:
- Huge savings in cost: 3-4x outsourcing
- Large increase in innovation via cost sharing and risk mitigation
- Developing more virtual and agile relationships with both customers and suppliers
- New approach to attracting/retaining people
- Infrastructure to provide unified knowledge sharing within project/Forum rules
- Legal infrastructure to support both enterprise control and ease of collaboration
Below indicates the basic processes from identifying mash-up opportunities to working with suppliers in a demand-pull environment:
An example of how collabsourcing can be used to earn an ROI on R&D is shown:
