The importance of raw, unfiltered collaboration
Challenges within an organisation, within reasons, should be made known to everyone within the organisation, without it being filtered to senior management’s perception of what the involved individuals need to know.
Instead of having just a group of select individuals owning a specific problem, companies should try to tap the skills and contributions from a much wider audience within the organisation. Break the exclusivity and the silos, and you should see increased productivity and quality.
Say, an issue arises, which needs immediate attention. Finance asset class needs to consolidate the old disperse legacy general ledger systems that they have in order to reduce cost of maintaining these disperse systems, as well as to have a consolidated, single truth view of their finances. Or credit crunch prompting the need for a new age of risk management, putting pressure on risk systems to be able to calculate risk in a near-time manner.
When issues arise within a department in a large organisation, it is common that each department would call on the same individuals time and time again to address the different problems. These individuals could be very experienced, highly respected in their fields, with broad knowledge. And they might even call on for external help, perhaps a trusted vendor which they have dealt with in the past, or a consultant.
When they need to engage expertise from other areas, it will be something like this.
“We need to hire a new person with expertise implementing Oracle GL. Engage the DBA team, as we will need a new Oracle database. Engage the hardware team, as we need an application server running Java, a reporting server with WebSphere. Ask for support team to provide example of feeds from each of the old GL system that we are going to replace. Let’s engage the network team, as we will need a 10GB dedicated link between application and database server”
This is what I mean by filtered collaboration. It is following an old fashioned hierarchical line of authority. Information is delivered on “need to know” basis. Somehow, someone higher up the chain decides what piece of information is suitable for each time he/she is collaborating with.
During my various engagements as an Oracle consultant, I have often found it frustrating that information is being drip-fed, filtered, sometimes with genuine intent to save me from confusion; everything has been tailored as if I have no ability to understand anything else that is not related to a database world. In occasions this has led me to make decisions that I would not have made had I been given the bigger picture earlier.
When companies want to tap to the brightest minds within their organisations, they need to provide them with the whole story, not tailored sub questions, which will only hold them back from contributing to their full potential.