Modern businesses are particularly adept at using information technologies (IT) to capitalize on global opportunities to collaborate. In an era where collaboration promises to be a new competitive tool, Collaborative Intelligence (CI) can be an invaluable and powerful aid.

“Intelligence is not to make no mistakes, but quickly to see how to make them good.
Bertolt Brecht (German poet and playwright, 1898-1956)

There is a phenomenal amount of intelligence that exists in today's businesses, if only it could be tapped effectively. This intelligence, which is more than mere analysis of data and information, has been collected almost unknowingly by businesses in their efforts to achieve efficiencies and enhanced customer experience. Organizational systems including ERP, CRM, HR and SCM provide such intelligence based on corresponding processes and vast amount of underlying data in multiple formats. When these various elements of an organization’s intelligence work together synergistically, they provide invaluable decision making tools to the business leadership. This is understood as Business intelligence (BI) – a mechanism of using collective information within the organization in a creative way. Yet, a greater opportunity for business expansion and growth can be realized by extending BI capabilities through technologies including Web Services and Service Oriented Architectures (SOA). The ensuing interactions transcend organizational boundaries, resulting in what can be called Collaborative Intelligence (Unhelkar and Tiwary, 2010). Such collaborative intelligence arises where multiple organizations are sharie their business intelligence for a win-win outcome without compromising their own market position and differentiation. Collaboration appears to be the imminent next step in the BI arena and in my opinion, developing and formalizing the CI capabilities of participating organizations is necessary to reduce the risks associated with such collaborations.

COLLABORATIVE INTELLIGENCE

Let me briefly outline BI and how it relates to CI. BI is the process of collecting information from various organizational functions and creating insights on which the business leadership can act quickly and decisively. Such BI enhances optimizes business performance for higher throughput. The business intelligence journey is categorized as multi-phased approach and is shown in Figure 1.

• Data: Business hold phenomenal amount of customer data such as names, addresses and demographics. Organizational data such as financial, operational and business rules are also maintained in huge data warehouses. The data is available in different forms based on organizational systems topology. Collaborative organizations will try to reduce the redundancy of such data required for their operation. For example Australia Post and Telstra could create a scheme of the customer address data that could be shared in such a way that data consuming organizations are not required to store the data replicated in various internal systems). The challenges in such scenario are the extent of data quality and secured access. The major criteria of success are the quality and access speed of the collaborative data.
• Information: is where the aforementioned data is analyzed and made available in presentable format. Collaborations offer the opportunity for one organization to analyze the data and make it available in a presentable format to various other organizations. This will allow the individual organizations to use the same business rules for presentation (publish information). The data is now processed using acceptable business rules to convert it in information and is available for subscribing organizations. The key challenge here is the consistency of business rules, their maintenance, and of course, the accuracy of the analysis. The actual presentation is less of a hassle due to sophisticated presentation technologies.

 
Figure 1: Collaborative Information Journey

• Knowledge is where information is presented based on the context of the request touch point. While this context can change, in many cases individual organizations can benefit from the knowledge of each others technologies and processes through collaboration. For example, in a recent major “sticky accelerator” problem of Toyota, one can argue that collaborative intelligence can (a) help other car manufacturers learn from the knowledge gained in solving this problem and (b) help Toyota learn from others in the future to avoid other potential problems. Collaboration not only has tremendous opportunity in the manufacturing sector, but also in utility and service companies. For example the call centre context for the customer will change depending upon the customer request and products and service details.. In the case of a customer calling to report a problem, the knowledge of the customer’s pending service request and history of the problem reported, could be combined with knowledge about the product resulting in a combined knowledge to service the customer.
• Business Intelligence (BI) provides the insights in organizational capabilities and bridges the gap between the vision of the organization and its execution strategies. This enhances the insights of the customers and provides a better customer experience, and also new innovation for products and services design for target customer segments. Such business intelligence has tremendous potential for application in the modern-day business world
• Collaborative Intelligence (CI) is where all of the factors described so far are put to use for collaborative purposes. CI ensures that the business intelligence that is not part of organizational differentiation capabilities is shared with other organizations and reduces the need of each organization to “reinvent the wheel”. For example, emerging technologies such as cloud computing, can enable depositing and withdrawal of sharable information by various organizations in a public/private format. Mobile web services can enable dynamic creation of intelligence based on the context of the user that enables personalized service to enhance customer experience.

CHALLENGES IN USING CI

The collaborative intelligence demands organizations to emerge from their current “silo” mentality wherein all the data and information is treated as their key differentiation with the competitors. The CI approach is to identify information that is common between organizations and industry sectors and make system-based arrangements to share and collaborate. The information that is considered as differentiating should be retained and safe guarded within the data warehouse of the organization. The required framework for such CI requires addressing the following key challenges:

• Security of the information shared should be paramount to each participating organizations. The security must provide the access to the right subscribers. The levels of security should enable use by collaborating organizations for agreed purpose and, at the same time, to safeguard the information from any malicious use.
• Privacy of data, particularly relating to customers, needs to be addressed through binding contracts. This challenge will need to factor in the legislative requirements across geographical boundaries (similar to an outsourcing arrangement). The privacy policies and business rules need to be encoded within the collaborating systems.
• Performance – the speed and accuracy of services of collaborating organizations will depend on their interfaces and the resources. While SOA provides necessary technical integration, performance still remains a major challenge in CI.
• Measurements –The success of CI will depend upon the value it will add to the participating organizations. The balance score cards approach(where overall performance measurements are based on collective measurements of financial, internal process, learning & growth and customer satisfaction) is suggested where organizations could define the “financial” measurements that will based on the investments in CI compared with the individual BUI and overall benefit organizations will reap by collaborating. The impact of the CI also must be measured on the internal business processes. For example, currently all the organizations are required to modify multiple systems based on legislative requirement of “payment Card Industry security standard (PCI DSS)” to safe guard customer credit card details. This legislation has mandated the organizations not to store credit card details in organizational systems. The solution adopted is for banks to provide a token that is stored in individual organizations and is used for all financial transactions.. The CI could be used for the implementation of the PCI in individual organizations. As discussed earlier, CI will provide a good vision for learning & growth of organizations based on collective intelligence of the industry and cross industry knowledge. This in term will assist in measuring customer management by all the participating and adopting best practices.
• Maturity – of CI will depend upon how well the participating organizations can handle the aforementioned challenges, how well their data and information can be aligned, and how they share the generic business rules services.

“Individually, we are one drop. Together, we are an ocean.”
Ryunosuke Satoro 

CI could be reality, particularly with the current advancements in the communication, security and cloud computing technology. A combination of SOA, Cloud computing, mobile technology and better security software will enable organizations to step in the collaborative intelligence world. This will offer organizations to publish and subscribe to data, information, knowledge and intelligence services. The landscape of business is about to change from competition to collaboration and there is no staying behind.

REFERENCES

Unhelkar, B., and Tiwary, A., 2010, Cutter IT Journal (Dave Higgins, Guest Editor), “Business Intelligence 2010: Delivering the Goods or Standing Us Up?”