Executive Interviews: Interview with Theo Forbath on Collaboration
March 2008 - By Dr. Nagendra V Chowdary

Theo Forbath
Chief Strategiest with Wipro Technologies
and leads the company`s Global Product Strategy and Architecture (PSA) Practice.

the knowledge and relationships it possesses by virtue of its local position. In combination, these three benefits cost, capability and contextual knowledge comprise what we call the "3Cs" of a global collaboration strategy.

2. Organize for effective collaboration.

   Firms that manage collaboration like outsourcing tend to adopt a "transactional" model. They treat partners like component suppliers, and focus their efforts on how to specify what is required from them in great detail. By contrast, successful firms recognize the inherent uncertainty in innovation projects, where a range of problemswhich cannot be predicted in advance must be tackled. These firms make very different organizational choices in terms of team design, contract structure and intellectual property management

3. Build your collaborative capabilities.

   Many managers incorrectly assume their firms are already equipped to work with partners. They believe it is possible to get it "right the first time" and are surprised and upset when things don't go according to plan. Yet firms are rarely good at collaboration in their initial efforts. Leading firms recognize this reality, and make investments in people, processes, platforms and programs to enhance performance over time. The result is that they learn to collaborate at a much faster rate than competitors.

• How do firms ensure that collaboration efforts support their business strategy?
  By focusing attention on themost important competitive variables. For example, using a partner to lower cost dramatically may not be the best move if a firm's competitive position is based upon superior performance and quality. Consider that in the automotive industry, both Rolls Royce and Daewoo probably use partners to innovate. But we wouldn't expect them to have similar approaches to collaboration, given they have very different strategies. Firms that do not recognize this fact end up adopting a de facto, unarticulated cost-reduction focus. Sometimes, this has serious negative consequences on the most important dimensions of performance.

• You mention four areas in which firms invest to build collaborative capabilities. What is the aim of the investments made within each?

1. People

   Effective collaboration requires people with different skills, given team members sit outside the boundaries of the firm in distant countries with different cultures. Rather than a focus on pure technical expertise, managers need a broader skill set, associated with the need to orchestrate and coordinate distributedwork. To reflect this emphasis, firms must change their recruitment, development, evaluation and reward systems.

2. Process

   Effective collaboration requires that firms rethink their processes. Distributed work involves a variety of additional tasks as compared to single-site projects, related to dividing tasks, sharing artifacts and coordinating and integrating work. Rarely does a firm's default process adequately address these activities. Effective approaches are discovered through informed trial and error, using pilot projects to test the value of specific practices and generate descriptive data to help assess performance.

3. Platforms

   Leading firms invest in an infrastructure a set of development tools, technical standards and working methods to facilitate distributed work. The more complex the project and the more the partners involved, the more sophisticated this platform needs to be. We were surprised to observe many firms pay inadequate attention to this area, causing major problems. Consider the Airbus 380, which has been delayed for two years, in part because two partners used different versions of the same design software.

4. Programs

   Successful firms manage collaboration efforts as a coherent "program," in contrast to organizations which run each project on a stand-alone basis. To achieve this objective, some firms have created the post of, in effect, "Chief Collaboration Officer," responsible for overseeing all their collaboration efforts. Such a move signals the importance of partnering to a firm's strategy, facilitates efforts to transfer learning across projects, and helps to standardizemethods for selecting and managing partners.

1. Collaboration Case Study
2. ICMR Case Collection
3. Case Study Volumes