In today's fast-moving high-tech industry, business agility is an essential capability for success. Business agility requires rapid decision-making capability fueled by ready access to key business information such as supply and demand; customer needs and wants; and competitive and general economic dynamics. Most high-tech companies have made significant investments in tier 1 business applications such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), product lifecycle management (PLM) and customer relationship management (CRM). While these systems provide access to structured, transactional information, they do not facilitate the unstructured, ad-hoc collaboration activities where people interact with people and where business decisions are made.

The biggest challenge in 2010 and beyond, therefore, will be to integrate PLM, ERP, supply chain management and other structured, transactional frameworks with tools and processes that facilitate unstructured collaboration. By embedding unstructured collaboration tools such as unified communications, live meetings and online chat within these structured, transactional systems, manufacturers will be able to increase business agility through an array of benefits ranging from improved innovation to more rapid decision making and faster time-to-market.

One of the key tools for unstructured collaboration is social computing. Many high-tech manufacturers have already adopted business-to-consumer social computing channels due to the explosion of sites like Facebook. The consumer practice of sharing information through social interaction has opened the door for a handful of manufacturers to examine the use of social computing tools in a business-to-business capacity -- but not in the traditional sense of using sites like Facebook and Twitter. Some high-tech firms have adopted similar capabilities through robust collaboration tools that already exist and that in most cases, they already own enabling them to share unstructured information amongst employees, customers and partners in a secure, corporate environment. By experimenting with such sophisticated collaboration tools, these companies have seen a host of benefits, ranging from improved innovation processes to more efficient customer service.

In 2010, we will see the adoption of social collaboration tools increase significantly, as more manufacturers will look to integrate social computing tools and platforms like SharePoint into their business processes, linking internal communities and external communities. These unstructured collaboration tools can help high-tech businesses gain visibility into customer needs and wants; improve customer support and satisfaction; and facilitate knowledge-sharing throughout the enterprise.

Here are three areas where we will see online collaboration take off in the manufacturing sector in 2010.

Ideation

In today's economic environment, many companies are counting on being able to innovate their way out of the recession and they will look to increase their use of practical social collaboration tools to advance this process. Leveraging social community tools to securely access the ideas of a broader set of people-including employees, customers and partners-helps high-tech enterprises generate the innovation that leads to new products, processes and services necessary to reduce costs and fuel revenue growth. When Electronic Arts saw that many of its employees were on Facebook, it used SharePoint to create a social networking portal on its intranet that allowed employees to share knowledge and innovative ideas. In just eight months, the portal attracted more than one-third of the company's employees and has helped them reduce duplicated efforts and increase knowledge sharing, all in a secure environment.

A number of high-tech companies have expanded the range of their communities, opening them up to include partners and customers. The key to success for this broader ideation effort is to ensure such collaboration is done in a secure environment rather than an unsecure, public platform. By empowering employees, customers and partners to interact and share ideas and information in a secure, real-time infrastructure, companies can reduce costs, shrink time-to-market and deliver products that best meet customer demands.

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