Every now and again either I, Mark Polly, or Jonathan Distad hit the topic of collaboration and whether there is value in collaboration tools or not. I’ve heard plenty of detractors or at least those who question it. (not necessarily a bad thing). Anyway, Erin Eschen Moloney (@erine) pointed me to this article about what it takes to really make collaboration useful by Kurt Marko. Surprisingly, I agree with a very large portion of what he reports and quotes Ryan Nicholes. What’s interesting is that both agree that useful collaboration comes from a tools that help you collaboration regardless of what you are trying to do:
As Nichols expands on in a recent blog post, anyone tasked with helping employees collaborate needs to address two questions: What is the center of work? And how can software best bring diverse elements–tasks, people, documents, and data–together to facilitate the collaborative completion of that work?
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Circling back to Nichols’ original question about the nature of work and the best collaboration software model, I submit that Cawthorne, in proposing a five-pronged schema of collaboration tools–messaging, content, conversation, process, and management–captures the complexity and nuance of the issue. Any software that attempts to force users into a single paradigm, whether centered on documents (like SharePoint) or free-form comment streams (like Facebook), is bound to be suboptimal. Each of us is constantly juggling personas, objectives, and tasks as members of different projects, work groups, organizational units, and the overall enterprise. We’re simultaneously working on longer-term one-time projects, short-term business process tasks, or routine clerical duties, each of which has different deliverables and work products.
So in some ways Kurt is saying we should all be on the now defunct Google Wave right now. Barring that, we should ensure that any collaboration tool at least allow us to focus on five aspects of it. I was in a presentation by Laura Wolf of IBM yesterday and she took a similar tack around their IBM Connections software only she stated that it’s about the community, the content, and the conversation. I think all of them are onto something. Any social collaboration tool has to make it drop dead simple to use and has to allow you to collaborate across a variety of scenarios. I would even quote a recent client and say, “when can each of these collaboration tools give me Dropbox type functionality. That’s drop dead simple even if it’s only about the content. So bottom line to all vendors out there, please make sure your tools are easy to use and let me collaborate with what and whom I wish…………..
