Part 2, Collaboration Tactical Verticals - expanded! (Statement 10)

June 17, 2008

Highly optimized teams perform at high levels - their productivity exceeds the sum of the parts. Moreover, each member contributes at a higher level and becomes more productive. Of course they also feel more committed and take pride and ownership of accomplishments. If done right, the team is the vehicle to bring game-changing, record-breaking innovations to market!

It’s no wonder that the investment in teams is the single best investment!

Gartner predicts that “by 2008, 50% of individual performance will be determined by the individual’s participation in projects and other collaborative work. This will cause an accelerated demand for collaboration, informal project coordination, social networking, expertise location and social process support technologies.”

It is now a business minimum to monitor activities on an almost 24/7 basis - just watch your spouse on vacation try to put away that blackberry! With travel costs soaring (gas prices), we are now relying more on mobile technology, web conferencing and high-resolution videoconferencing - especially as our virtual teams become the norm, expanding across time zones, and national, linguistic and enterprise boundaries.

The needs are real, very real. And if not met properly, shadow IT steps in to fill that need. The result…email grows out of control to morph into some kind of collaborative document repository, and source for best practices and even stretching to perform workflow. There are also non-coordinated initiatives in play that lead to multiple standards and duplication of costs and efforts. At some point, these will need to be reconciled. It is not different then the company that allows master data management to consist of enterprise level spreadsheets to hold data in a persistent manner. Yikes!

Lets start by stating the need that your success will depend upon the appropriate standardization and scoping of the collaboration stack. I view it as a 2 dimensional thought. The first dimension is strategic - it’s the enterprise level (horizontal) of collaboration. This is the level that everyone (knowledge workers, that is) in the organization is aware of and has come to depend upon. This builds upon the intranet concept, bringing to the organization additional corporate-wide tools. This is a good step in changing the corporate’s culture - but that is another blog yet to be written. The second dimension is the title of this blog “tactical verticals”. This is the ability to scale collaboration services ‘when the time is right’. Better said, when initiatives exhibit different configuration of characteristics, then there is a corresponding configuration of collaboration services. Hopefully, these are kept to a few in number and truly driven by need.

It’s always good to start at the foundation. So, lets group collaboration a couple of ways and list out our potential services. There are web-based and non-web based technologies”

Web-based collaborative technologies: Email, Web Conferencing, Team Sites, Document Versioning, RSS Reader, Forums, Chat, IM, Surveys, Shared Calendaring, Social Software, Knowledge Mgt. Systems, Blogs, Wikis
Non-web based collaborative technologies: Telephony, Faxing, Voice Mail, Video Conferencing, Workflow, Project Mgt. Systems, Code Control

But, lets group them by functional capabilities:

Electronic Communications

PC Based eMail
Mobile eMail
Wikis
Community Sites
Team Sites
Document Versioning
Blogs
RSS Reader

Electronic Conferencing

Forums (message boards, discussion groups)
Online Chat
Instant Messaging
Internal Survey Tools
Web Conferencing

Collaboration Management

Electronic Calendars
Workflow Systems
Knowledge Management
Social Software Systems

What are your next steps…? There are many angles to consider, but for this blog (tactical verticals), I would suggest:

* Take inventory of your current toolsets
* Determine who owns ‘collaboration’
* Decide upon a horizontal enterprise-wide standard
* Develop tactical vertical attributes (when do you need IM, voting, work flow, wikis, etc…)
* Configure a collaboration stack for each scenario
* Perform a gap analysis (what do you need that you don’t have)
* Determine standards (products/technologies/best practices) for each

Take the next steps…look at:
- Value
- ROI
- Current Culture
- Transitioning
- Marketing
- Etc…

Having tactical verticals ensures that you can scale your collaboration stack when you need to - the goal here is to match the team’s need with the appropriate technology. Simply allowing everyone access to everything may introduce the wrong controls and lead to chaos and confusion. You have one shot at this - you can’t un-ring the bell! Once these tools are embedded in people, processes and technology, they are hard (if not impossible) to remove. The key to consider is to keep your options few, so that you don’t end up with a dozen different configurations to manage. Click here for my 13 points regarding collaboration