CollabIT provides assistance to small businesses on collaborating and supporting each other in the current economic environment. The document discusses that groups outperform individuals, and collaboration creates new shared value through high levels of commitment, trust, and specialization between parties. It proposes forming a CollabIT group with shared goals to increase revenue through customer sharing and resource utilization, while reducing expenses through shared services. The group would develop processes to achieve goals, capture lessons learned, and ensure relationships are built on trust over legal agreements to support collaboration long-term.

1. CollabIT
Small Business Collaboration in IT
Providing invaluable assistance for
business on how to survive in the
current economic environment through
collaboration and support
Russell Yardley
Algonquin Investments
yardley@algonquininvestments.com

2. The Lone Wolf

3. Soon learned to hunt in packs

4. The group out performs
the individual
result more protean
for everyone
We all grow
taller and
stronger

5. Co-ordination Co-operation Collaboration
Co-ordination Co-operation Collaboration
•Driven by directive •Driven by an immediate need • Driven by mutual self interest
•Focus on short term goals •Can succeed even if commitment •Requires high level of commitment
uneven on both sides
•Teamwork helps but not essential
•Value is incremental & uneven •Creates new value
•Value created by individual action
•Only one party may benefit •Value can be shared by both parties
•Little additional value
•Lower level of trust than for •Often requires specialisation
•Trust not essential to success
collaboration •Requires high levels of trust
Increasing levels of trust
Source: Economist Intelligence Unit

6. Source: The Origins of Wealth Eric D. Beinhocker

7. • Complex • Complicated
Collaboration Co-operation
Co-ordination
• Chaotic • Simple
When do you collaborate?
From Shawn Callahan Anecdote

8. • It’s about creating capacity and capability in small groups of SMEs
by combining their specialisations to achieve exceptional results
• It’s about each share of the rewards from these results being
more valuable than those from solo endeavours
• The complex collaborative enterprise works because each SME is
Collaboration:
honed to do what it does best and is driven to meet its
What is it?
obligations to the group
• It is in each member’s interest to ensure that their fellow
members are capable and do perform at the highest possible
level
• It becomes self evident that all members should share resources
and opportunities to maximise the enterprises rewards

9. • Create a CollabIT group that has a shared goal
• Increase revenue by sharing customers building on trusted customer
and member relationships
• Better utilising resources (employees)
• Reducing expenses by sharing common expenses (accounting/legal
etc)
• Use this goal to direct and motivate action
Collaboration:
What to do? • Create real boundaries (who’s in who’s out)
• Develop methodologies to achieve goals
• Processes to assure repeatable high quality
• Processes to minimise transaction costs
• Hard to reverse commitments demand shared ownership of assets
to align interests of participants to help collaboration to endure over
long periods
• Provide a vehicle for collective learning (capturing lessons
learned, heuristics, adaption and innovation)

10. • Build groups that are complimentary not
competitive
• Different but overlapping expertise and capabilities
• Mutually supporting goals
• Similar cultures
• Combine specialisations maximise
Collaboration:
How to keep it going?
customer value which will create the most
wealth for all
• Recognise that complex relationships can
only be built on trust as they are too
difficult to render to a legal agreement
• So it is all dependent on building trust

11. Performance
A performance culture stimulates its members to
do their best, go that extra mile, take initiative
and constantly improve everything that is done
within the organisation. It accepts mistakes by
Collaboration: turning them into learning opportunities. It
Creating the culture measures outcomes to improve execution.
An honest culture ensures members understand
reality. Important things are clear and
understood. Members are honest with each other
and themselves.
A merit based culture rewards people based upon
the value of their contribution.

12. Co-operation
A mutually trusting culture trusts other member's
motivation and trusts in their skills to get the job
done.
A reciprocating culture encourages its members
Collaboration:
to quot;do unto others what you would like other to
Creating the culture
do for youquot;.
A culture with a shared purpose has members
who put the organisation's interests ahead of
their own and behave as if everyone is in this
together.

13. Innovation
A non-hierarchical culture provides permission for
everyone to challenge ideas and provide ideas for
the organisation's good. Value and argument are
all that counts never titles or positions.
Collaboration:
An open culture welcomes new ideas regardless
Creating the culture
from where they came.
An evidenced based culture ensures that the facts
are established first and argument is based on
hard evidence not opinion.
A challenging culture ensures that there is a sense
of competitive urgency - always.

14. Russell Yardley
Algonquin Investments
yardley@algonquininvestments.com
www.AlgonquinInvestments.com