Collaboration Enables Design Innovation by Ken Amann, Director of Research, CIMdata, Inc.
by Ken Amann, Director of Research, CIMdata, Inc.

Today's market place is demanding more from providers of products and services and more innovative products at less cost. At the same time, companies are working in an ever-expanding world of distributed operations and facilities and cross enterprise partnerships and supply chains. Leveraging the expertise of team members dispersed organizationally and physically in order to continue to provide innovative products and services has become critical to the success of today's businesses. As companies become more and more decentralized, collaborative technologies have tremendous potential to speed information exchange, improve workflow, facilitate teamwork, and enable innovation among team members. Indeed, the distributed operations and partnerships many organizations are now establishing will increasingly depend on such Web-based tools to avoid communication bottlenecks and reduce the costs of bringing everyone together for face-to-face meetings. More importantly, these tools are enabling the dynamic interaction between individuals and teams needed to foster innovation. Recognizing the huge market potential of collaboration technologies and the appeal of the overall message to manufacturers, the vendor community has bombarded users with products tied to this theme in some way. No wonder there's so much confusion in the market about what constitutes collaborative technology, how it's applied, and what it can do for organizations. In some cases, all users hear from vendors are vague platitudes about the broad benefits of collaboration and precious few details on actual functionality. Nevertheless, there are many legitimate and noteworthy advances being made in this rapidly evolving field, and it is becoming an even more critical component of a full collaborative Product Definition management (cPDm) strategy.

Of particular benefit to dispersed engineering teams trying to discuss complex designs or resolve problems are a class of tools known as synchronous collaboration systems. An excellent example of this is provided by synchronous co-modeling systems. These allow everyone in the team, regardless of where they're located, to simultaneously view, manipulate, annotate, and discuss the same 3-D model on their screens. Such tools emerged a few years ago to fill the need for shared work support in concurrent engineering initiatives and were some of the first technologies in the growing collaboration market we see today.

The enormous value of synchronous systems comes from the capability they provide for users in different locations to work with the same design data all at the same time. By enabling direct on-line interaction between dispersed users, these tools facilitate the synergy of bringing different perspectives and expertise into the product development decision-making process. Team members are able to "see" and comment immediately on other members ideas, brainstorming to solve problems and create new designs.

While an individual may have great ideas concerning a design problem, when that individual can talk and share his or her ideas with others and get their feedback, new ideas and approaches surface. As the team members interact, they become more innovative in their thinking, incorporating the ideas of others to expand and improve each individuals approach to a problem. The power of collaboration leverages each individual, expanding their knowledge and capabilities, thus fostering a innovative climate in which the results of the group are greater than the sum of the individuals.

The term person-to-person collaborative technology is gaining more wide spread use as a way of describing these tools, and aptly describes what they truly represent. The tools are aimed at enabling people to communicate interactively and work more effectively together, and this is the most basic element of globalization, supply chains, extended enterprises, strategic partnerships, virtual teams, and other such lofty business paradigms based on decentralization. Effective real-time, person-to-person collaborative tools make these approaches feasible. There just isn't any better way to bounce ideas around, share insights, or otherwise work together interactively on design projects at a distance - enabling innovation.

The ultimate goal of person-to-person collaborative tools is actually pretty simple: to allow people in different locations to work together as if they were in the same office. The basic idea is essentially to recreate the environment of the small "one room" company where everyone sat together, looked at one another's work, talked across a desk to get things done, shared ideas and contributed to one another's efforts. Person-to-person collaborative tools use the latest technologies to deliver these capabilities, which provide enormous benefits to companies. Distributed operations can now be more nimble and react faster to market changes, customer demands, and product innovations. Most importantly, the tools allow companies to leverage their greatest asset: the intelligence and expertise of their people to create innovative products and services for their customers.

About CIMdata
CIMdata helps companies develop innovative and profitable products in the evolving global e-business environment. The company accomplishes this through its worldwide strategic consulting services and in-depth research, targeted for industrial organizations and suppliers of technologies and services.

For more information, contact CIMdata at 3909 Research Park Drive, Ann Arbor, MI 48108, U.S.A. Tel: +1(734) 668-9922. Fax: +1(734) 668-1957. Or visit the CIMdata Web site: www.CIMdata.com