Collaboration

Significant numbers of corporations are either piloting or fully deploying Web-based collaboration technologies (e.g., Microsoft SharePoint®), and delivering them via the enterprise portal. These collaborative technologies include support for:

  • Unified calendars to coordinate availability at individual and team levels
  • Chat tools or online meeting room applications
  • Discussion threads that focus on the outcome of a decision
  • Document co-authoring and the ability to add annotations, vote, and set subscriptions
  • Team tracking and collaboration for common deliverables
  • Delegated administration capabilities that enable collaboration "rooms" to be opened by virtually any person for any purpose, without central administration or support
  • Robust searches.

Loosely included in many discussions of Web 2.0, collaboration is finding its place within the enterprise.

Our teams typically define the need for collaboration, illuminate definitions of success, and come up with a workplan with milestones and reporting, means of communication, work by products and the best review process.

Challenges of Collaboration

With our clients who have undergone substantial collaboration efforts, we have seen successful adoption of document sharing features, but less use of chat, discussion boards, e-mail, calendars, or project tracking features.

We see a number of reasons for this partial adoption:

  • Users already have ingrained habits and more robust tools for online communications. Only collaborative document sharing has an edge over networked drives or document management for sharing files in a team context.
  • Most communication plans focus on the individual value of each specific feature, rather than the holistic value of the suite of tools.
  • Teams often preferred to set up and maintain a private collaboration space, rather than participating in public information communities or going through the more formal processes of requesting the development of a dedicated area of the portal.
  • Since only members of an Intranet generally access collaboration spaces or rooms, assets managed under collaboration can become isolated because they don't participate in a common taxonomy and, they can't be reused easily elsewhere because they depend on the collaboration tool for management or delivery.

Still, the promise of collaboration remains valid. Partial adoption and unintended consequences are always to be expected when deploying a new technology that directly intersects with people's work practices. The questions corporations should be asking are, first, "How can we make sure users are making the best use ('best' meaning with the highest return to the business) of collaboration tools?" and second, "How can we manage collaboration as a component of our enterprise information environment rather than as an exception to it?"

Find out more about how LDS makes collaboration work.