The rise of the collaborative culture
Author’s note: This blog is the final in a series of four, exploring the topic of culture from a digital perspective and highlighting what some of the key local, national and international considerations are.
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A slight change of direction
If you’ve had a chance to look back at my previous blogs you’ll note that I’ve largely discussed cultural considerations from a local or international perspective, focusing on the impact of new technologies on local cultures, as well as some of the key considerations necessary for effective cross-cultural interactions.
This blog will instead focus on culture from an alternative viewpoint and look at how the introduction of new processes and technologies are resulting in a whole new culture of collaboration.
A culture of change
Factors such as Globalisation and Digitalisation are forcing organisations of all shapes and sizes to rethink the way they have traditionally operated in order to remain relevant in the rapidly changing global environment.
With the unrelenting economic climate also in mind, many businesses are considering more innovative, cost-effective and collaborative solutions to both enhance service delivery and meet the growing needs of their current and prospective customers.
The organisational adoption of new technologies and new processes, such as social media platforms and social networking, is just one example of the kind of solutions becoming more commonly considered due to their ability to facilitate networking, improve client interactions, communicate and collaborate in online forums, and create online communities.
Additionally, these tools are also being used to empower citizens to share in responsibilities, risks and decision-making, while the organisations themselves are able to benefit from the knowledge and specialist skills of members of the public.
While this type of approach may be a radical change in the way that some businesses and members of the public have traditionally interacted, what it does provide is the opportunity for organisations and the public to work together more collaboratively towards achieving mutually beneficial outcomes.
Collaborative cultures in practice
Various authors agree that the internet coupled with social technologies have been instrumental in bridging distances, connecting cultures, and are also a key driving force behind the emergence of new online cultures (Manjoo, 2016; Bhatia, 2016; Pookulangara & Koesler, 2011)
Using a mix of local and international perspectives and examples from both the private and public sectors, let’s explore these concepts further and look at some of the ways that new processes and technologies are fostering a whole new culture of collaboration across a wide range of industries:
Crowdsourcing — is actually very old concept made easier through technology and involves taking tasks that were traditionally performed by employees then outsourcing them in the form of an open call to a large, yet undefined group of people.
This approach may involve the use of social media posts to gather feedback or opinions on an organisations services, request individuals to conduct user acceptance testing in order to identify potential bugs or defects, or to seek new innovative ideas from the wider public.
Nokia’s Ideasproject is an example of open innovation by a global community, where the organisation draws on the experiences of consumers and participant innovators to generate new ideas about the kind of products they would like to see from Nokia.
Citizen sourcing is where government departments enlist members of the public to assist with the design and delivery of it services. Citizens are given the opportunity to influence outcomes, assist public sector agencies to be more responsive and effective, and in some instances, to help “execute government services on a day-to-day basis” (Linders, 2012). In this model, the government department holds primary responsibility.
A local example of citizen sourcing in practice is the development of NZQAs NCEA student app, which launched in 2014. Students were engaged from the start of the project and involved in the design of the app, choosing the functions that would be of most value to them as the main users.
From an alternative, international perspective, Ruth Dineen discusses how student involvement led to the solution and design of a more effective assessment scheme.
Open source paradigm is based entirely on the concept of cooperation not competition. It involves the use of programs or software where the source code is made freely available to the public for use, modification and redistribution. The software is typically supplied under certain licenses that offer unrestricted access to all users, permitting them to make adjustments to the software and to redistribute it in altered or unaltered form.
Open source usually consists of a community of software engineers that are committed to producing high quality code, and maintaining and protecting that code. This is largely due to the visibility of the source code where a developer’s work can be openly scrutinised, as well as the potential reputational consequences that creating poorly developed code may have.
Government as a platform — According to Tim O’Reilly’s blog “government becomes an open platform that allows people inside and outside government to innovate”.
It a system in which the government acts as a service provider by making its knowledge and IT infrastructure available to the public, enabling its user community to devise creative outcomes, which evolve through interactions between the government and citizens.
“Government is not responsible for the resulting activity, but can leverage its platform and influence to foster greater public value” (Linders, 2012).
The Ministry of Education’s 2014 Investing in Educational Success (IES) initiative is a good practical example, which involves groups of schools and kura coming together to form “Communities of Schools”. These schools self-identify and most commonly group together based on their geographical locations.
The intent of these communities is to collaborate together to achieve better educational outcomes for students and to work towards identifying, developing and meeting achievement objectives. The Ministry’s role is to provide the targeted tools and resources to help the communities engage in collaborative problem solving and professional development.
Distributed human intelligence tasking is another form of crowdsourcing where individuals collaborate to achieve a project or goal.
An example is the 2006 Why Are You Here — Right Now? (YRUHRN) project where over 1000 people collaborated, using Amazons Mechanical Turk, to compile a book.
The book itself was published just 30 days after the project began and a percentage of the proceeds from the book sales were used to benefit the children from families directly impacted by the Katrina disaster.
Do-it-Yourself Government — is similar and is demonstrated when “wired citizens self-organize and create new opportunities for citizen-to-citizen co-production, potentially presenting a substitute for traditional government responsibilities” (Linders, 2012).
This is an informal arrangement, where the government plays no active role in the activities, and does not interfere, but may provide a facilitating framework.
A great local example is from 2011 where a university student turned to the power of social media and enlisted an army of student volunteers. This group of more than 1300 young people took to the streets to clean up the aftermath of the devastating Christchurch Earthquakes and the city council supported this initiative by supplying the students with a priority list of the most damaged areas.
Welcoming a collaborative culture
Even though it has been 470 years since Heywood (1546) first coined the phrase ‘Many hands make light work’, today, in an increasingly digital world, where the Internet, mobile phones and various other evolving technologies are driving more modern practices, attitudes and modes of thought, many organisations are now discovering different ways to embrace this epigram in order to accomplish tasks and solve problems using a collective network of intelligence.
However, for organisations to successfully leverage the opportunities that many of these examples present, some changes must first be initiated from within and is likely to start with the need to address their own organisational culture.
While this in itself is no easy hurdle to overcome, a good place to start is by demonstrating what collaborative cultures supported by technology look like, and the variety of outcomes that may be achieved if organisations, its members and the public were to work collaboratively together towards the common good.
References
Bhatia, R. (2016, May 16). The inside story of Facebook’s biggest setback, The Guardian. Retrieved from: http://search.proquest.com.helicon.vuw.ac.nz/docview/1789113112/BD1DE0812954440CPQ/1?
Linders, D. (2012). From E-Government to We-Government: Defining a Typology for Citizen Coproduction in the Age of Social Media. Government Information Quarterly, 29 (4), 446–454.
Manjoo, F. (2016, June 1). Why the World Is Drawing Battle Lines Against American Tech Giants. (N. Y. Company, Editor) Retrieved from New York Times (Online): http://search.proquest.com.helicon.vuw.ac.nz/docview/1792710005/CBCDE417EFAC4995PQ/1?
Pookulangara, S., & Koesler, K. (2011, July). Cultural influence on consumers’ usage of social networks and its’ impact on online purchase intentions. Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, 18(4), 348–354.
