4 Pillars of Successful Collaboration

The American Heritage dictionary defines “collaborate” as working together, especially in a joint intellectual effort. This represents an appropriate definition especially when you think of the Latin root “labor” or “work” in the word. Collaboration truly does mean a joint effort to get to a better result if you hadn't worked together. To do so requires effort from all parties. There exist today a large number of collaboration tools from various vendors. The question is not if you can collaborate with these tools but on what is the desired end result and if the tools will make you more efficient in getting to the end result.

Collaboration can be compared to a house. A house has many uses, similar to the many reasons you might collaborate. You may also pick and choose which rooms and which activities you will perform in each room. The house is supported by the Pillars of Collaboration. These pillars include Messaging, Real Time Collaboration, Team Collaboration, and Social Networking. Each has value. Each supports the house but can be used individually.

When you look at these Pillars you will see that each Pillar addresses a different aspect of collaboration.

• Messaging: Enables teams and individuals to communicate and manage their interactions in a formal, auditable manner. This includes email, calendaring, scheduling, and contact management.

• Real Time Collaboration: More focused on ad-hoc communications providing the team with the capability to easily initiate a real-time conversation between one or more individuals. This includes instant messaging, Web conferencing, and unified communications capabilities

• Team Collaboration: provides the content management services that collect, store, and manage the documents that are pertinent to the team’s activity. This can include document management, ad-hoc workflow, and basic project management.

• Social Networking: Represents the newest pillar in the collaboration house. This pillar provides a way for teams and individuals to share knowledge not only within the team, but to be able to reach out to an extended group for their input and feedback. Technologies in the pillar can include blogs, wikis, RSS, and tagging.

When looking to implement a collaboration project, it is critical to understand that a single pillar alone will not address the requirements of your project. It often takes capabilities from multiple pillars to address all of your needs. Collaboration isn't about the individual technologies but rather the sum of the technologies. Each individual technology, like instant messaging or social communities, is powerful but the sum of these generates a greater ROI than the individual parts.

A successful collaboration project starts with good business requirements and a suite of technologies to fulfill those requirements. The key to realizing the maximum value for the project is all about how you put the tools together. The individual tools themselves do not bring the complete ROI.

The power of the various collaboration tools comes from their fit to your particular needs. In other words, the end goal defines the tools that you may use. For example, imagine a group of people that need to organize a meeting. Many activities need to happen to do this. One person will find and reserve a meeting space. Another will create an agenda, while another will send invitations, and so on. During this entire process, you may use phone, email, instant messaging, a team space, and even social networking tools to find the right speaker. You create value when you use a combination of these tools. A collaboration vendor also provides value by providing tools that interact well together.

Over the last few years, social networking tools, such as blogs and wikis, have a made a splash in the market. Many companies have implemented collaboration projects focused on these technologies. There have been many articles written challenging the ROI of a collaboration project, pointing out that the cost to implement these projects often outweighs the benefits. Clearly understanding the goals and the requirements of your collaboration project will enable the selection of the correct set of tools and help ensure that your organization realizes the maximum benefit of the project.

Michael Porter, Michael.Porter@Perficient.com, is a Principal, Portal and Collaboration for Perficient. Michael has more than 15 years working with technology and helping customer meet their content management, portal, and collaboration needs. He has worked with many clients in understanding and defining how to align business needs to the available technologies.

Alan Weintraub (alan.weintraub@perficient.com) is a Principal, ECM Solutions for Perficient (www.perficient.com). Alan has extensive experience in all phases of Enterprise Content Management solution implementations. He has worked as a Research Director at Gartner, focusing on the Content and Document Management markets and a consultant where he designed and implemented document management systems. Prior to his consulting experience Alan engaged in technology management for major pharmaceutical companies. He has over twenty five years of experience in the information systems profession.