Carl Weinschenk spoke with Vanessa DiMauro, president, Leader Networks.

Weinschenk: What does Leader Networks do?
DiMauro: We’re a strategy consulting firm dealing with business-to-business and online communities and professional networks. We’ve been around for three-and-a-half years. I’ve been building online communities since the 1980s.

Weinschenk: That’s a long time.
DiMauro: My great joke is that I can finally admit to what I do. The biggest change in the industry is really not about any of the tools, methods or processes, but in the buy-in and the enterprise awareness about the need to communicate and collaborate with clients. Until recently, the best practices were that when you wanted to get customer input or reaction about customer-facing issues, you would hire a firm to deploy the Boy Scouts to do surveys. Due to the advent of collaboration technologies, there’s a greater willingness and ease never before possible to engage with clients or internal constituencies about key issues. The methods or tools have not changed that much but the willingness to engage directly, to collaborate directly, is now best practice.

Weinschenk: What benefits occur when this is done?
DiMauro: The greatest result that we see happening is an accelerated ability to get things right. Through co-creation and engaging directly, there is a speed to market not before possible. Now we can find out what some of the key delivery mechanisms are for new processes and services before a product or service has been fully baked, before you create a new line of business or service. Before, you had to hope it met the client’s needs. Now you are engaging clients in the co-creation process.

Weinschenk: Can you provide some examples?
DiMauro: We’ve been with LexisNexis Martindale-Hubbell on the final frontier of technology and collaboration. The original goal was to help outside and inside counsel find each other. It was a static directory. It was in paper for 144 years. Now it is online. It is now in the beta stage of a professional network, which is a safe and secure space for clients and lawyers to learn some of the more tacit information about each other. Another great example … is INmobile.org. It is something of the little darling of collaboration. The mobile industry is moving too quickly. Mobile and wireless need information at the executive level that is more immediate than traditional ways that it is distributed. Here, they can collaborate on changes in real time. They are the makers of change and have their fingers on the pulse of change because of instant collaboration technology. The third example is an intranet for Cisco. Cisco’s strategy group created a knowledgebase wiki collaboration tool to tap into the wisdom and knowledge of its employees. Through the use of collaboration tools, the Collaboratory goes really deeply into things like research, pricing, general information and market conditions from the staff on the street. Field staffers are able to upload in an easy way and build institutional knowledge to take information off the desktop and put into a shared space.

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