Better collaboration within IT will

• fetch more innovation
• improve team building
• improve effectiveness & efficiency
• reduce the over all IT residual risk
• improve organization attitude

The above are top 5 value added imperatives a better collaboration will bring to an IT organization. Each one of the above adds value to the core business, saves IT G&A and minimizes the IT risk exposure.

How the CIOs and other senior executives will manage and measure the collaboration within their organization. We all familiar with Intelligent Quotient (IQ) and it is a measure how smart a person is? Likewise, an organization must have a metric to measure the collaboration  within their organization.

I was searching to find out what kind of metric is available to measure it in the industry. Based on my research, I could not find any metric to measure it. So I innovated a metric called enterprise collaborative quotient (ECQ)

What is collaboration?

Group of people working towards the same goal.

Why collaboration is needed?

IT has an organization goal every year (which is aligned to the IT strategy which supports the business strategy which supports the competitive strategy) and every member of the organization works towards the goal (Strategy focused organization). When a group of people working towards the same goal, to avoid duplication and ensure full coverage, collaboration is required within the organization.

What is the Enterprise Collaborative quotient?

Even though I prefer to have more mathematical way to calculate it, in reality, the formula approach will not work in management science. My famous saying is, it is not

However, a methodical approach is proposed to calculate the enterprise collaborative quotient. Let me make sure we understand why are we measuring this? To measure how the organization is working together towards the organization goal.

The structure to the problem is, what are the factors involved in measuring it. The factors are

1. Understanding of

• the organization goal (theme),
• the overall IT strategy (targets, performance measure,strategic objectives),
• who is who (theme managers, initiative owners)
• overall business bottom line
• core values and company’s mission and vision

2. Frequency of

• formal face to face meetings/discussion
• informal face to face meetings/discussion
• Impromptu face to face/phone/chart meetings/discussion
• proposal of new suggestion/ideas for a target set for a different team
• brown bag sessions
• huddle meeting
• skip level meetings
• team meeting
• town halls
• 1:1 meeting with direct reports
• special interest groups (boat club, motor cycle club, quantum cafe club,womens forum)
• lunch meetings
• dinner meetings
• group activities (like community services)

3. Willingness to

• Share knowledge
• Listen
• Challenge the obvious
• care for others
• be open

Based on types of the organization, the above factors can be used and information can be garnered by interview or survey. The weight factor can be applied based on the core function IT supports.