ODIS Capabilities

A high degree of employee collaboration is necessary for businesses to run smoothly. As companies streamline their operations to reduce costs and increase responsiveness, the nature of collaboration will broaden to include suppliers, partners and clients as well as employees working in different cities and time zones. Recognizing the essential human factor in business, IBM researchers and IBM Global Business Services experts broaden their approach well beyond pure technology to include such areas as social network analysis; Business Practices Alignment; and Services Sciences, Management and Engineering research.

ODIS solutions can help businesses improve collaboration by pinpointing existing barriers and providing methodologies, tools and technologies to improve effectiveness.

• For a global company that had already developed an internal community to share best practices and expertise, this meant conducting a structured analysis of the current effectiveness of that community. The results highlighted the measurable benefits of participation for individual employees, as well as for the community itself and the organization as a whole. Future areas for improvement were also pinpointed.

• For a pharmaceutical company, this meant the design and deployment of simple tools to increase awareness and sharing of critical information across departments and job functions.

• For a large multinational company, this meant creating interactive visualizations of key business processes to increase awareness of status and action items for participants. These activities helped to reduce costly errors.

• For a product manufacturing company, this meant developing communication tools that included integrated features especially critical in collaboration for small groups.

• For any company, improving collaboration is a critical element in driving business transformation.

• Collaboration assessment provides tools, methods and expertise designed to remove barriers to collaboration. It can help identify who talks to whom and whether the company is ready to form communities. It can also uncover knowledge of business processes that would otherwise remain hidden and left out of the design of new processes.

• Communication tools are designed to provide the next generation of capabilities for close collaborative communication. Clients are expected to benefit from extensive end-user research and evaluation of the costs/benefits of current communication technologies.

• Strategic design and visualization uses design techniques and new visualization tools to create representations of current and future collaborations, which aid in making decisions and planning.