Tuesday 6 October 2009

My Thoughts on, "Collaboration: know your enthusiasts and laggards", article from Cisco

Last week I spent some time reading an excellent and very interesting piece from Cisco, "Collaboration: know your enthusiasts and laggards".

I encourage you take a look at the results of the study Cisco undertook into the factors linked to successful adoption of collaboration via networked tools: instant messaging, wikis, shared workspaces, video conferencing, forums and discussion boards etc.

Whilst reading their interesting findings a couple of things struck me.

On page one of the article was the sentence,

"You can use the study results to maximize your return on investment from collaboration tools. One way is to implement business practices shown to lead to more enthusiastic collaboration."

This struck me as possibly being another way of saying: if you have already purchased tools to allow collaboration you can enjoy a return on that investment by putting in place an environment which will encourage collaboration using these tools. Please correct me if I'm wrong but this sounds a little too close to the assumption that collaborating is an end in itself, not a means to an end.

To my mind, collaboration is very important in many walks of life and many types of organisations can benefit from doing a lot more of it. Some of it will come via software; much of it should come through face-t0-face chats, discussions and more formal meetings. None of it will, I think, lead to a return on investment in and of itself. If I asked a CEO how their business was doing in these hard times, I wouldn't expect them to say, "We're doing well, we're collaborating so much more than before."

For me, the key to a return on investment from collaboration is controlling that collaboration. Knowing what the business goals and objectives are and making a conscious decision to use collaboration as a technique to help achieve them. Also important is the monitoring of the collaboration taking place and then linking the collaboration efforts to the outcomes of the collaboration.

Collaboration can have a very specific goal, "We have a project to deliver and two teams in different cities need to collaborate, in these ways, to successfully deliver that project."

Collaboration can be less concrete, but no less valuable, "We have a group of people over here, and another group over there, who would benefit from talking more and understanding each other - their jobs, their day to day issues and how they go about solving them. We're not sure what will exactly come from this but we will set up collaborative spaces, monitor them, get feedback from the collaborators, and look at how these groups do their jobs one month, three months, six months, after the collaboration was established. We'll then analyse how collaboration contributed to getting a, b, and c done, learn from the experience and build on it.

Rather than saying, "We collaborate therefore we succeed", I'd like to be able to say, "We had a business need, problem or corporate goal, we put a number of collaboration techniques in place and we achieved our goals or fixed our problems. We also saw where and how our collaboration contributed to our success."

Collaboration is a tool to use to achieve an objective, not an end in itself. Return on investment comes from what results from collaboration, not from collaboration alone.

For many people and organizations the goal should be to achieve results through targeted collaboration, not to just collaborate more.

I hope we all succeed because we know how to collaborate, we know why we're doing it, we know what we get from it, and we know how it contributes to our goals and objectives.

Ian

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