What Is Structured Collaboration? Business and IT Glossary

Structured collaboration combines presence and unified collaboration with elements of enterprise content management (ECM), business process management (BPM), and task management into an integrated work process that coordinates multiple activities from multiple workers to produce the desired business outcome.

The idea of structured collaboration is that people can simultaneously work and interact with others toward specific and measurable outcomes. Structured collaboration uses part technology and part process framework to arrive at business outcomes that often include new ideas and innovation.

A driver for structured collaboration is the problem that enterprises are plagued with meetings and ad hoc interactions that don't produce results or desired outcomes. A lack of structure or an outcome-based focus can lead to wasted time and lost opportunities for innovation. Tying collaboration to the desired outcome of each business process gives each collaborative interaction an actionable context and ensures the best use of human participation in the workflow.