Collaborative Innovation

There are more choices in software than ever as market leaders continue to build out their software suites and the number of new cloud solutions continues to grow. Unfortunately, this has done little to reduce how frequently large organizations find that their requirements cannot be easily fulfilled “out-of-the-box.”

The problem is that more is not necessarily better. As vendor suites swell with new products that provide every conceivable feature the suites themselves become less integrated, more complex, and very expensive to implement and manage. Cloud solutions on the other hand tend to be way too simple. The explosion in cloud offerings brings lots of choices, but a dozen products that are still in their early stages of development are hardly better than one.

Once “off-the-shelf” is no longer an option organizations can find themselves in a difficult situation. Fully outsourced engagements are losing favor due to both budget constraints and a business model that seems to facilitate projects going on forever as opposed to being completed quickly. In-house development is often considered only as a last resort, even for organizations with highly capable development departments due to the extensive drain on resources that should be contributing to the organization's core business. Collaborative Innovation has emerged as a viable and often preferred model for a broad range of product and project development. Like most popular concepts, the term Collaborative Innovation gets used in a variety of ways that can muddy the understanding of what it means. For us, Collaborative Innovation is an opportunity to:

• Match each component of the project to the best possible resource, whether that is someone within the customer’s organization, our organization, or a third-party.
• Provide full engagement of the customer’s organization, while minimizing the resource commitment of each individual participant.
• Follow a best-value path to project work, enabling the efforts of organizations that want to develop in-house by providing specific domain knowledge and experience.
• Abandon the “captive customer” business model, and share risk equally since each phase of a project must provide ROI and justify engagement in future phases.

Collaborative Innovation is tremendously rewarding for the individuals who are involved and for the organization. Together collaborative teams speed time to market, decreases risk, and lower cost-of-ownership; often using of Enterprise-ready Frameworks to deliver the bulk of functionality that is not specific to the organization.

Through continual research and development activities, the Contelligence Group creates effective technology for stubborn content challenges. These innovations are packaged as server or client frameworks that are enterprise ready and either contributed to the open source community or offered commercially.

Our Collaborative Innovation services start with understanding a client's business goals and either defining or reviewing their requirements. By adding new components to the appropriate enterprise ready framework, our two teams can rapidly prototype solutions and gather stakeholder feedback. This dramatically reduces the time and resources needed to deliver an optimal system today that can easily be expanded tomorrow.