Collaboration is a topic that near and dear to my heart, both as a practitioner as well as an employee. I spent my formative years working at an international bank company, 110,000+ employees, 72 countries, back when you could tell people you worked for a bank. One of the challenges we had on a grand scale was collaboration. While there was regional businesses, a significant amount of our business was aligned globally. Not only was our business global, so were our clients. This meant that not only did we need to share information across silos, we had to do so in a way that would function in a global environment.
Like everyone we started with email and grew the solution and the technology as the requirements evolved. We pushed our infrastructure maturity as well as the product development cycles. In the end, we had a true collaboration environment with sufficient governance from a global team but allowed for regional requirements and exceptions. We also spent the time (and money) to write a set of self-service tools that allowed IT to get out of the way of the business. I have never been a fan of gate keeping and tried to limit control to what was required by auditors or regulators.
CIOs have a tough sell with Enterprise collaboration
Enterprise collaboration is a dubious pursuit. You can almost sense its impending failure the minute it gets introduced to a workforce and becomes just another tool that employees are supposed to use.
It doesn’t help when CIOs downplay the value of collaboration tools by simply procuring something that meets the lowest common denominator and enables them to check another item off their to-do list.
The article accurate highlights the challenges that companies face but my experience, both personally and professionally, is that the pay off is worth it. That assumes, the needs can be defined. I recall a customer meeting to discuss social. As the customer’s team describe the pain points, their IT landscape and tools and their profile in terms of locations, mobility, etc., it became clear that social wasn’t what they needed. Improved governance around document management and standardization of tools would address the majority of their pain points at a lower cost. The customer was surprised by my recommended. I have learned over my career is that technology is not always the answer. You might have seen Perficient’s new tag line, “vision. execution. value.”; technology doesn’t appear at all.
The flip side is that when there is a clear need, the deployment needs to be managed carefully. In many cases the project is more about cultural change than technology although technology is certain a critical components. This is where the project can go wrong. I recall one client that decided to launch their collaboration initiative very broadly. The initial launch contained blogs, wikis, instant messaging and web conferencing all integrated into their existing employee portal. It was almost a skit from Second City where the topic was “collaboration”. Unfortunately the results were not as enjoyable. The client was able to relaunch with focus and ended up with a successful deployment.
Collaboration is difficult because it is a balancing act that IT is not terrible good at. Enterprise collaboration or Enterprise Social has to be a mix of the right tools along with the right support and engagement structure. Just like a portal needs an anchor, a compelling reason to drive adoption and engagement, collaboration or social needs the same. Part of a road map needs to be identifying the roles and people who are connectors, people who naturally share information and won’t look at social as another task to do. Project managers and product managers are natural choices because they can deflect requests by pointing inquires to the social tool(s). Depending on the organization’s size, a new role of community manager may need to be established, at the very least that role needs to be identified and assigned as additional responsibilities. Thought needs to be put into not only on-boarding communities but also sun setting. Certain tools are better suited for limited duration activities (a proposal, opening a new location) vs ongoing. Some products are better at retaining the knowledge of retired or departed colleagues, something that may be important to your organization.
Brian Pillar, IT manager at the software firm TechSmith, agrees that adoption is a major challenge. Enterprise collaboration tools rarely come cheap, so making sure the organization rallies around the new platform is key.
Organizations will never realize their return on investment for collaboration until individuals or teams stop creating workarounds to avoid an enterprise collaboration tool altogether, says Pillar.
A high risk/high reward approach is partnering with the most vocal critics, the group with the most active shadow IT group in your organization and have built most of the workaround. Perhaps the group that as you unwind their work arounds, you have grudging respect for what and how they accomplished their goals. Try to have the lightest touch possible. Determine what you need to manage and try to give away a reasonable amount of control. Spend time determining which existing tools or processes can be depreciated as Enterprise Collaboration comes online.
I listened to one of Perficient’s client present at IBM ConnectED 2015. His biggest lesson learned from his deployment was user education. They spent more time teaching users what to do and in retrospect they should have spent the majority of time on the why. Why use tool A vs. tool B. Why to use social vs. email. That is the thought I would like to end this post. Make sure you spend enough time of the why of Enterprise Collaboration. That won’t make it easy but it should make it easier. And if you ever find yourself at North and Wells in Chicago, try to find time to see whatever is playing at
