But technology is only the enabler. The most challenging within an organization is to establish a collaborative culture. And to establish this is really difficult in an environment where competitiveness and enviousness reign. Especially where the people think in “departments” and not in “processes”.

So we need a process oriented enterprise. Ideally the associates receive a salary with a fix part and a variable part which is based on some cross-departmental process improvements and/or new cross-departmental process establishments. This benefits will be the supporting incentives to use such tools.

To do this, we have the next challenge. We have to convince the top management first. But very often we have in the top management people who can more or less write e-mails and know facebook and other Web 2.0 tools only from their children to play with it. So you need a lot of time, a good preparation, a non-techie language and some good figures about cost reduction which you can clearly measure.

But how can you clearly measure such collaborative improvements? Until now I didn’t found something about this topic.