Starry Blue Brilliance

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Category Archives: IT Collaboration


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Successfully Transforming Your Organization Depends on How Well You Do This

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“For when ideas flutter in haze, we collaborate without notice and collect them as butterflies only to set them free into the world.” – Shawn Lukas, goodreads.com

How well does your organization promote an environment of collaboration?

How important is sustainable business success to your organization?

When considering the answers to these questions, you’ll soon realize that collaboration matters more than you realize.

In “Transforming Internal Collaboration for the Digital Economy” by Phase 2 Technology, we learn that “Forrester Research highlights the need to harness big data, transform customer experience, leverage cloud-based innovation, and embrace the mobile mind-shift. Unfortunately, many organizations that have successfully adopted Forrester’s principles still fail to follow through on an indispensable aspect of digital transformation: internal reorganization paired with technology modernization.”

So, how does an organization successfully achieve this “indispensable aspect of digital transformation?” Through collaboration.

But this can only happen when an organization has a culture that promotes respect, trust and care. I talk more about this in “How Thought Leaders Can Thoughtfully Lead Collaborative Company Cultures.”

Organizations with collaborative cultures are also more receptive to innovation and transformation, which are necessary for sustainable business success.

Now, aren’t you glad I asked?

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What’s Missing from Your Marketing Technology Blueprint?

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You can build the most elaborate marketing technology blueprint, but it won’t serve you well without one key ingredient: collaboration.

But before we tackle that challenge, what is a marketing technology blueprint, and why is it important to your organization’s innovation success?

In “How to Create a Marketing Technology Blueprint,” Scott Vaughan, CMO of Integrate, describes it as “a simple visual diagram – captured from a white board photo, organized in PowerPoint or a good old-fashion schematic – that outlines current tech, systems, processes and data flows utilized or needed by marketing. By documenting and visualizing systems and processes, marketers can quickly capture the current state of their marketing technology, identify gaps, overlaps, and chokepoints, and, most importantly, have a single view of their technology investments.”

The most successful marketing technology blueprint is one in which the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) and Chief Information Officer (CIO) collaborate together to create it.

In “Getting the CMO and the CIO to Work Together as Partners,” Matt Ariker, Martin Harrysson and Jesko Perrey point out that “the CIO is becoming a strategic partner who is crucial to developing and executing marketing strategy. To do this successfully, “CIOs, obliged to turn new technology into revenue, need the CMOs to help them with better functional and technical requirements for big data initiatives.”

I’ve worked in marketing AND IT roles, so I understand the needs of both of these valued departments in an organization. If you want to improve communication and collaboration in YOUR organization, please contact me at peggy@starrybluebrilliance.com. Together we’ll collaborate to design your continued business success.

 


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Collaboration Ensures Our Future Success

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What’s the one skill we can all learn to master that applies to any job in any industry?

It’s collaboration.

This sobering fact really hits home in “5 Essential Skills You Need to Keep Your Job in the Next 10 Years.” After Trend Spotting, Collaboration is the #2 essential skill you’ll need to keep your job in the future. Be sure to read about all of the “five skills to start building now to maintain your marketability over the next decade.”

Here are some other compelling articles to help support your efforts to master collaboration to ensure your future success in any organization in any industry:

How do you promote collaboration in your organization? Send me your stories to feature in my ongoing Collaboration@Work series. 🙂


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Why Collaboration is Good for Your IT Career

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Actually, collaboration is good for everyone’s career, but in this post, I’m highlighting how collaboration can support a stellar IT career.

In yesterday’s post, “This Collaboration Idea Will Move You and IT to Greater Business Success,” I shared ideas on how collaboration helps everyone succeed, especially when incorporating IT into the strategic business conversation.

The #1 tip for IT professionals (or anyone) to advance their career as described in “3 Ways to Advance Your IT Career,” is to Be A Team Player. Eric Grevstad explains that “you’re part of a bigger team – the whole company – and you’re judged on how much you contribute to the business’s bottom line.

The driving force behind “being a team player” is collaboration. Here are some fabulous real-life examples of how collaboration supports everyone’s success:

Is your organization looking for ways to improve communication and collaboration? Contact me at peggy@starrybluebrilliance.com to discuss how we can work together to create masterpiece communications.


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This Collaboration Idea Will Move You and IT to Greater Business Success

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This collaboration idea will literally move you to greater business success and will ensure IT (Information Technology) is a part of the strategic business conversation.

In “The Easiest Way to Get Your Team to Collaborate” Sam Shank, CEO and Co-Founder, HotelTonight, shared the successes of a “desk swap day, where people traded desks with colleagues on a different team.”

Overall, this idea was well-received by most HotelTonight employees. When reading the comments posted on this story, I noticed many people asked how this idea could effectively work for an IT team.

The best way to implement this idea for IT is to already have IT employees co-located with other business teams. This leads to positive relationships between IT and other areas of the business and improved collaboration, which leads to greater business success.

For example, in “How CIOs Build Bridges with Other C-Level Execs,” Leslie Jones, Senior Vice President and CIO at Motorola Solutions, talked about the success of “embedding IT staff in business functions, or instituting functional rotations to familiarize staff with other parts of the company. Now they are part of their business operations teams, determining strategies and plans for new customer services along with the other leaders in those groups. And then those teams turn to IT to help execute those plans.”

Here are some other resources to help focus IT on greater business success:

Need help creating and managing high-performing integrated communications and learning systems for your IT professionals? Contact me at peggy@starrybluebrilliance.com to discuss how we can collaborate to create masterpiece communications for your organization.