We are professional business consultants who apply our skills, knowledge, and experience in knowledge management and marketing disciplines to assist clients in shifting their organization's work practices to be collaborative.

We believe that most organizations have the desire to be more collaborative, inside and out, but that time-to-collaboration has inherent barriers:

• It takes time to determine where collaboration, within the organization or across the company or with partners and customers, can have the greatest impact. Too often, the imperative to "collaborate more" just sounds like yet another well-intentioned corporate change effort that has no practical starting point
• It takes time to establish the relationships and work processes necessary to begin collaborating effectively. It's often just too easy to keep "doing it the old way" because the job at hand (always) takes priority over learning new ways to work.
• It takes time to learn how to use collaboration technologies and to adapt them to the organization's language and work style. Vendor-supplied training can overwhelm individuals by giving them more than they can use, and requiring them to translate tool feature to "what helps me get my job done."

We address these difficulties by focusing on context and connectivity and provide custom consulting engagements to:

• Diagnose and enhance business, organizational, and personal connectivity using organizational and value network analysis to target those opportunities that will have the biggest impact;
• Assess organizational capabilities in knowledge creation, transfer, and retention to facilitate the identification of specific programs and initiatives that will enhance not just the connectivity in the organization but also employee's ability to connect;
• Bridge the communication barriers across stakeholder groups in preparing for deployment of collaboration technologies for high-performing networks and teams, putting technology in the context of people and their existing work practices.

All of our engagements are customized, using a core set of services which constitute our methodology and knowledge base. For a closer look at our method for assisting clients in the adoption of collaboration technologies, please download our presentation from KMWorld 2005.

Patti blogs at Networks, Complexity, and Relatedness

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We are very pleased to announce the availability of a detailed report, The Social-Network Toolkit, written by Patti Anklam for the Ark Group. This report provides a comprehensive view of how social networks impact collaboration and business processes; describes the structure of networks and emerging methods for analyzing social networks; and catalogs the organizational responses and strategies for creating, sustaining, and leveraging powerful human networks that bridge organizational boundaries.