We're starting to look more formally at collaboration tools and discussing what we can deploy to help people collaborate in the organization. I'm pretty sure that like most technology it's more a people-issue than a technology-issue with just enough 'help-from-tools' to get people focused on what tools to buy, on how to train people to use them, and on how to support and maintain collaboration tools and rather than on the culture, the way we work, and how we form networks now.
Anyway, I'll try to note resources as I find them and ideas as they occur to me and become coherent (unfortunately for me--ideas occur to me long before they become coherent enough to express).
==
Collaboration is only partly an IT problem. As with many things that people do, while tools can help us collaborate more effectively they can’t necessarily overcome cultural, time or communication issues. In addition, collaboration tools need to be evaluated for whether they’re actually facilitating collaboration or interfering by adding process.
People do what they need to do to get their work done
--despite tools
--despite processes
--despite policies
If tools, processes, policies work with them, they’ll use them. If people refuse to learn and/or use policies, tools, or processes (even when, or especially when, there's training available), it’s a very strong indicator that those tools, processes or policies make the job more difficult or don’t help get the job done rather than that the people just don’t like change.
It’s not about ‘changing the way people work.’ It’s about making sure that the way we’re changing actually helps people get their work done.
Others say (what I would say if I were more concise and incisive):
Technology Confined Collaboration
After the CIO picked himself up off the floor, we spent the next 15 minutes talking about why so few [collaboration tools]. It wasn't culture. It wasn't anticipated reciprocity. The IT lady summed it up best when she said, "web collaboration doesn't work the way people do." Technology was confining the natural human collaborative process. This particular product was forcing these folks (all 26, 000 of them) into working with a fixed set of tools, which was the real problem. If your problem didn't fit almost exactly into the function set the tool provided, you were forced to change the way YOU work. Compound this by being forced to work within the firewall and the need to have IT set up a space and the point is made.Collaboration is about people. Collaboration needs technology frameworks that support adaptive, ad hoc interactions. Adaptive from the sense of extending functionality on the fly and securely embracing new members on the fly. Simply put, it's the swarming culture fused with adaptive technology.
It's not simple to be productive with process-oriented collaboration tools because there are technology (e.g. firewalls, network connectivity) and administrive (e.g. permission, set-up) boundaries. The lack of flexibility and end-user control over the tools creates a lot of *noise* throughout the process and precludes any sense of immediacy. Not to mention the firewall issue specifically, which implies that there are certain people that I can't collaborate with even if I need to.What is the requisite laundry list to make net-based collaboration/communication really take off? The answer isn't obvious to me, but here are a few suggestions (from the end-user perspective; surely there is a separate IT-perspective list)....
- As simple to use as email or the phone
- End-user driven
- Fast and familiar
- No network boundaries
- No administrative boundaries
- The "right" tools (messaging, file sharing, user presence, and more over time)
- Flexibility to (a) over time, add new tools to meet new modes of usage, (b) interact in public or private context, depending upon the situation, (c) add or drop people from a thread of communication on an as-needed basis
- Ubiquity of network connectivity, hardware, and software
I think this is a great list and I would add:
Ray Ozzie says that email (which along with face to face and telephones is where most collaboration goes on now) is broken and that shared space of some kind is really better for workers to collaborate. What he’s talking about works best when all the people you want to work with already work with you in the same organization. But we also need good, fast, easy ways to work with people in other organizations, individuals, folks we meet at conferences (even while we’re at conferences), and many other configurations.
So, where do we go from here? I'm still working on my ideas for this and will post more in a day or so.