Haven’t flown for a while, so I’m not used to having 3+ hours to myself during the daytime. Wanted to get some thoughts down on collaboration.
I used to work for a company that branded itself as the Collaborative Business Experience. I never could figure out what they were doing that was particularly different that would justify us making a big splash about being newly collaborative. ‘Hi there, Mr. Client. Now we’re going to give you the collaborative business service delivery experience, which is differentiated from the non-collaborative experience I delivered yesterday by these three key factors. First…’ It wouldn’t have happened. It couldn’t have happened. The interesting thing was that the culture was already pretty collaborative. No one knew to call it that. We just delivered what we said we would the best way we knew how.
Fast forward four years, and now collaboration is now a popular industry buzzword. Whole groups of companies and informal networks have spun up around collaboration and collaborative technologies. I was listening to several presentations from the Collaborative Technologies Conference that was held in June. The people presenting at this conference offer a sharp contrast to my first experience with a collaborative experience. Obviously, the technologies around collaboration and the Internet have evolved to such an extent that we now have many more opportunities to explore various forms of collaboration. The various communities continue to innovate around various platforms. The 37 Signals guys are democratizing development in Ruby, the Foldera guys are offering a new way of enabling office/project productivity, and the IBM and Microsoft guys are doing their things. I highly recommend giving a listen to the content from this conference. There’s some good stuff that shouldn’t necessarily change the way you think about technologies, but it should make you think about the way you work… your team works… or your organization works. I think this is the most valuable item I’m taking away from all the buzz around the collaboration.
Some personal experience. Our clients are still pulling us into discussions around how to improve individual and coporate productivity. Recently, our clients are pulling us into more discussions about getting their people to work together in a more collaborative way. They may not use this language, but the questoins and businesss problems we’re being asked by senior leaders are clearly centered around getting people to work together in a more seamless way, to access, assess, and analyze information in a more real-time and simultaneous way, to do these types of activiites regardless of physical co-location.
It’s no secret that we biased toward the Microsoft technologies to solve these collaborative business problems. It’s also no secret that implementing new technologies that enable collaboration is only one of several steps to improve an organizational productivity. Among clients whom we’ve served, we’re seeing the two most important collaborative success factors are processes, culture, and leadership. No surprises.
Processes are a hard part of collaboration. Too much, and you stifle the productivity, innovation, and creativity you hope to drive out of a collaborative experience. Too few, and you can have one of two things happen:
- You could implement a bunch of tools and none will be used.
- You could implement none, and you could have a fabulously effective collaborative effort develop or you could have a fabulously ineffective morass created by only the folks who choose to dominate the collaborative exercise.
Culture is closely tied to leadership in my mind. Culture may be the corporate side, or macro-level, of leadership. Getting to a high adoption rate and to real productivity gains requires that the organizational culture be one of sharing, openess, flexibility, and speed. There are lots of resources on how to get your organization to this point but we favor the top down model where leadership drives and demonstrates the cultural characteristics of both the need for change and the personal implementation change.
A guy I used to work for used to say, ’speed of the leaders, speed of the team.’ As I moved into leadership positions, I used ot carry this saying as a responsibility I had to both the folks working for me and the folks I worked for. In the case of collaboration, leaders have to step up and demonstrate how to collaborate by collaborating themselves. They have to include others in decisions. They have to share information with team members. They have to lead by example in the use of the tools that enable collaboration.
More to come on this.
Hey Marc,
Nice post. I’m so glad that you mentioned the word “Foldera” too, because it meant that I found you. Now I can listen to what you have to say from here on in.
I think you have well-captured the problem with collaboration-as-hype and collaboration-as-standard-business. I think we collaborate all the time … it’s the only way to get things done in a group/team situation. And yes, numerous vendors, of which Foldera is one, are seeking to bring better and more capable tools to the table to help in an increasingly virtual, increasingly fast-paced, increasingly non-face-to-face environment (such as your “real-life collaboration” story the last week, http://bizsystembuilder.com/blog/2006/07/06/real-life-collaboration/).
As a couple of additional data points that you may find helpful in your work and thinking:
1. before I joined Foldera, I put together a framework to help people think about what is needed from collaboration technology to aid team productivity. It is vendor neutral, and gives 7 thinking points. See http://www.shared-spaces.com/blog/2005/02/the_7_pillars_o.html.
2. Mike Gotta has a really nice post on the art of collaboration in business. I’ve printed this out so I can refer to it often. See http://mikeg.typepad.com/perceptions/2006/05/collaborative_c.html.
Finally, adoption is a big issue. I don’t think there’s a silver bullet, but I think that working closely with the intended users … explaining what’s in it for them, teaching them how to use the new tools until they are comfortable with them, and championing their use and value … are key aspects of the adoption challenge. As your work continues, I hope you will speak to some of the learning that you are doing and seeing in this area.
All the best for your consulting work at Cogent.
Kind regards,
Michael Sampson
Global VP of Word-of-Mouth Marketing
Foldera, Inc.