Making your activity more connected and social

Sustaining end user enthusiasm and momentum is seen as one of the most significant challenges for organizations using collaboration solutions. If the collaboration software does not immediately benefit the user’s daily core activity, there’s little motivation for the user to learn or contribute.

Many organizations have people “disconnected” in different department silos, both in local offices and geographically dispersed locations. These people have lots of insight and knowledge and could get a lot more done, only if they had a way to get access to timely, properly structured, information and data; and they could be “connected to the dots” – other people inside and outside the organization, so they could collaborate more effectively………

Integrating Processes

There’s no point in starting with a “blank sheet of paper”; or people who are not part of, or do not contribute to the process. This is one major problem with other enterprise collaboration systems; another is that they tend to expect the whole organization to be part of  a “collaboration process” that transcends all boundaries.

Quite simply, collaboration is not a solution in itself – it’s just one of many tools needed to enhance access to information and communication inside and outside the organization.

We believe it makes much more sense to start integrating “collaboration” into a core business processes and building and forming dynamically selected closed group teams of relevant stakeholders around Listings to drive and improve the effectiveness of the activity. What’s important is that it has to be managed and controlled.

And once operational and effective, you can simply “scale out” and start linking more people to more processes and inviting other people to a Listing where it’s beneficial! And then there are infinite possibilities for process improvement and gaining a competitive advantage by extending to clients, insurers/underwriters, other business partners and regulators.

You start with brokers, co-workers, colleagues, managers, and other identified “experts” as appropriate, and give them Sign In access to the system. The broker’s job is in creating new Listings and placements and/or renewing existing placements, which is the fundamental core business process of all Commercial Insurance Brokers. The system puts the initiating broker in complete control of the creating, building of, tracking and monitoring the process in conjunction with the insured; and also the control of who should be invited to be part of the listing team and which insurers should be invited to bid.

Listing Team Members (stakeholders) are given differing access rights, dependent on their role in the process; from hardcore contributors producing placement layers, to people who can pass comments, through to passive observers.

What are some of the benefits of this?

• Making the whole listing process much more productive. Employees can find information and people and expertise they need to work with much faster.
• Focus. Employees spend less time in e-mail and more time in collaborative interaction. Communication intensity and duration in new social collaborative platforms is much higher than in older technologies.
• Internal information and business processes are more visible, discoverable, and shareable.