In doing research for my book on enterprise collaboration I’ve been spending some time interviewing and speaking with various organizations. I’ll be sharing in-depth insights and ideas when the book comes out but I will discuss some of the high-level learnings on this blog.  One of the things I’ve been exploring recently is the composition of an enterprise collaboration team.  In other words, your organization decided to invest but who is going to make up the team that actually helps roll things out?

Based on the conversations I have had thus far the team looks like any number of combinations from the following groups of people.

  • Senior level executive who helps drive this initiative from the top
  • Business unit leaders who will be managing these initiatives
  • IT professionals who will be managing integration and security
  • Compliance and legal professionals assisting with policies and guidelines
  • A group of enthusiastic users/supports to act as the evangelists.  It’s important to have several evangelists geographically and departmentally distributed throughout the organization
  • Project manager who will be the overseer of the project as a whole
  • Someone from a user experience team

Some companies have larger teams and some have smaller teams, some companies have every single one of the above roles involved whereas others might only have one or two people.  I’ve also noticed that most organizations organize their teams in one of two ways.  The first is a permanent enterprise collaboration team which means that either new employees were hired or that existing employees transitioned job functions.  Again, these are long-lasting teams usually at larger organizations (from what I’ve noticed).  The second type of team is the ad-hoc team where employees come together for the launch of the inititaive but retain their existing job functions.  This team meets regularly to discuss ideas and strategies around enterprise collaboration but they still retain their “day-jobs.”

The more time I spend researching and working with organizations the more apparent it becomes how unique and different every organization is when it comes to collaboration.  Just like in a recipe the main ingredients are there but the amount of those ingredients, the combinations, the timing, and how those ingredients come together to make something are all very very different.  It makes it fun and challenging at the same time when working with and writing about enterprise collaboration.

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