Make Progress In Small Steps
By Michael Treacy and David Dobrin (published December 2001)
= worth knowing
Online Article
FREE

Treacy's and Dobrin's article is quite useful reading when you are planning to collaborate with another organization. It offers case studies to sensitise you for possible strategic mistakes and frameworks to support you in developing a tailored collaboration plan.

Treacy and Dobrin analyse miscarried collaboration projects and identify strategic mistakes made by companies during the "first-wave" of collaboration. They claim that the lesson they hadn't yet learned is that communication technologies are merely enablers of collaboration (...). Their advice for the "second-wave" companies therefor is:

They must recognize when their focus is too much on technology and not enough on business. They must see when their own ambition is too great. And they must have a variety of strategies in their arsenal and learn how to use each one on the appropriate target.

Treacy and Dobrins offer also frameworks to help those "second-wave" companies to identify the kind of business collaboration appropriate for their business goals (e.g. information exchange vs. cross-organizational teamwork) and the level of technical connectivity necessary and affordable (e.g. information access vs. process management). However, the frameworks are not very elaborated. More information on the interaction of technical and and business issues and concrete application examples would have been very useful.