Collaboration is a pretty broad term; according to Wikipedia:
“Collaboration is a recursive process where two or more people or organizations work together in an intersection of common goals — for example, an intellectual endeavor that is creative in nature—by sharing knowledge, learning and building consensus. Most collaboration requires leadership, although the form of leadership can be social within a decentralized and egalitarian group. In particular, teams that work collaboratively can obtain greater resources, recognition and reward when facing competition for finite resources.”
The whole point of this post is not to point out a right or wrong way of collaborating. It’s to present possibilities and to have a discussion about them. There are a lot of directions that we can take the collaboration discussion, these are just a few. Again, the whole point of this post is to get you thinking about collaboration and how/what it can look like.
It’s easy to imagine what collaboration can look like for 2, 20, or perhaps 200 people. However what does collaboration look like with 2,000 people? How about 20,000? and 40,000? As you can expect, the enterprise challenges for internal collaboration are much more challenging. As a company begins to grow and spread out, the number of touch points greatly increase and so does the amount of information. Imagine how much information one person possesses at a company, now multiply that by 30,000. The amount of information is mind boggling which means that there are both opportunities and challenges that need to be addressed.
So having said all of this, how should a company collaborate? Surely we can’t have 30,000 people openly chatting to each other simultaneously on one platform right? There’s going to be a lot of “noise” if that’s the case. Plus there are going to be people from around the world in various departments and not everyone needs to be involved in every conversation. So we need a way to structure collaboration so that it makes sense. How about departmental collaboration? What if every department had it’s own sub-section within an overall Enterprise platform? That way all of the marketing, product development, and PR departments would be able to communicate with their own teams? Let’s just take a look at a few high level scenarios for what collaboration can look like within the enterprise.
- Everyone openly collaborates and shares with one another
- Each department collaborates with relevant people meaning that all the marketing guys talk to marketing guys
- Every geographic area has it’s own collaboration sub-group and within that we can find departments for a particular area. So for example an enterprise with a global presence would have the US as one collaboration sub-group and under that we would have all of the marketing, PR, and product development groups. The same would hold true of every other geographic location that the enterprise has a presence in.
- Everyone openly collaborates and shares with one another and users can create their own specific subgroups based on need.
Perhaps this is still the wrong way to look at it. What if instead of approaching this from an organized, structural viewpoint we look at this in terms of feature sets. For example what if the entire company had access to some features of an internal collaboration tool but others did not? As an example, the entire company can have access to creating an internal profile and using internal microblogs. Managers or specific departments can then have additional features such as wikis that allow them to take collaboration to the next level. Why? Because not everyone needs to have access to a wiki and not everyone needs to collaborate on projects. SocialText is a good example of an enterprise 2.0 platform that offers several features sets for companies based on need.
This is a broad discussion to get you to think about the multiple ways that companies can collaborate within the enterprise. What is the best and most efficient way? I think that is going to depend on the company. I’m curious to hear what you think of collaboration. How would you structure your collaboration efforts if you had 30,000+ people?
I would be interested to know whether this is applicable to education as well, as I am a teacher, in Australi, who has established a wide network.
Of course, it is applicable in any industry
Hi Jacob! I found your site through your contribution to Junta42’s “100 social media predictions” post. I couldn’t agree more with your assessment of the state of online collaboration. How do you bring order to chaos?
At bulbstorm, we’re creating online collaboration tools that bring organizations together with customers, partners and employees on Facebook and on bulbstorm.com. The Facebook platform is particularly intriguing right now. Why drag users into yet another third-party portal requiring yet another set of log-in credentials? Facebook is enabling organization to collaborate with users where they already congregate.
An interesting time, indeed. Looking forward to 2010!
Interesting question. When you get into that size you have many issues and some of them are not technology issues. Companies of that size have different levels of management and decision process. I find that limits any openness a collaboration tool may offer. This is changing, but slowly.
My suggestions is classify by organizational groups or by project. Companies that size, usually have both and both Groups and Projects are usually defined well enough. Some things don't need to be split up like micro-blogging, it can be done by thousands of people. eg twitter and still holds value with millions of postings.
Of course a third option can be to let the employees control what they see and contribute to. The Intranet / enterprise 2.0 tools on the market do allow them to do that but see paragraph one why this is usually not an option currently.
Tim
Having a sensible tagging strategy as Traction Software Jordan Frank points out in this presentation might help: (http://traction.tractionsoftware.com/db/attachm…). In the ideal collaborative workspace I see (http://wp.me/PJ7ba-R), the knowledge worker is presented with to the point information of what (s)he is currently working on (what you have produced previously on the issue, what your work-group has produced, company, competitors, national and international research, etc.). I believe we have technology that does this now – just look at Google Ads coming up relevant to what you are writing or reading/watching, Traction TeamPage is a tool capable of presenting a workspace to you customizable to your needs and with good access/security functionality down to paragraph level. I think we have tools now capable of handling massive information resources and work/interest groups that can span thousands. But a key here is that the user must be capable of choosing what s(he) wants thrown at him/her.
Great post Jacob – I work with one company across three offices with about 50 total people, and collaborating with that alone is a hassle.
I'd be curious to get your take on project management/collaboration software programs for the enterprise. Full disclosure, I work for a high-tech PR agency that represents start-up companies. One of the companies we work with is Dapitv, and on-demand collaboration software program – really cool stuff, makes collaborating and the job of project managers much easier.
I know there are other similar tools like this as well. Not exactly sure how interested you are in collaboration, but I'd be curious to get your take on the collab/PM software for the enterprise. You have a few comments here pertaining to differenet industries, I know Daptiv and their competitors offer solutions for education, financial, manufacturing, legals, etc. industries.
Hi Tim,
Technology issues are actually a tiny part of the problem. The real challenge comes into play when dealing with people. When we talk about large scale collaboration wikipedia is an interesting model. It was not structured in a particular way but instead took on the structure that the users wanted it to have. One of the biggest challenges is increasing adoption and getting people to actually get involved. Many companies have existing intranets that just hang around without being used, why? Employees need to understand the benefits of collaboration not just from a company level, but more importantly from an individual level.
As I mentioned above, technology is not really the challenge, it's people. It's organization and culture, processes and adoption.
Hi Steve,
I bet it's tough, even at a smaller level. Regardless of what tools you chose to use they need to be relevant to the challenges at hand. This is why strategy and discussions come first and everything else is second. No sense using a complete enterprise level platform if the company only wants to solve the problem of document sharing.
I agree, it's first of all a people and management philosophy issue and culture and the like you mentioned. (see also interesting discussion “What Enterprise 2.0 really means”: http://andrewmcafee.org/2009/11/enterprise-2-0-…). But how do we inspire adoption. I got interested in E2.0 as a user, along with hundreds of my colleagues who struggle with inadequate tools/environment to share information/knowledge (email and siloed team sites are still main repositories and production tools for information items in many large corporations). We say as users: “Give me a good alternative that works the way we work and think, and takes good care of my and other's information items that it may be shared, found, reused, expanded and improved – Information Dynamics”. A first take at describing this work space is done here: http://wp.me/PJ7ba-R (this is not perfect/complete and should be expanded/improved). I know that a single tool out there can probably not deliver this today, but technologies are there to do it. And why don't corporations spend as much money on putting this highly efficient work space for the knowledge worker togejter as they did introducing (or just upgrading) it's ERP systems. Just give me this work space that I can live in most of the time (at least how much as I now live in email), that makes me effective, that gives me what I want, that is my Intranet (in fact we all deliver content to the community/Intranet/portal (whatever)). If you give me that as a user, I will take it. It will not be an adoption issue, because it's the way I work. That's how Vannevar Bush thought in 1945 (http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/194507/bush) – can't we get there now in 2010??!!
Rolf
I agree, it's first of all a people and management philosophy issue and culture and the like you mentioned. (see also interesting discussion “What Enterprise 2.0 really means”: http://andrewmcafee.org/2009/11/enterprise-2-0-…). But how do we inspire adoption. I got interested in E2.0 as a user, along with hundreds of my colleagues who struggle with inadequate tools/environment to share information/knowledge (email and siloed team sites are still main repositories and production tools for information items in many large corporations). We say as users: “Give me a good alternative that works the way we work and think, and takes good care of my and other's information items that it may be shared, found, reused, expanded and improved – Information Dynamics”. A first take at describing this work space is done here: http://wp.me/PJ7ba-R (this is not perfect/complete and should be expanded/improved). I know that a single tool out there can probably not deliver this today, but technologies are there to do it. And why don't corporations spend as much money on putting this highly efficient work space for the knowledge worker togejter as they did introducing (or just upgrading) it's ERP systems. Just give me this work space that I can live in most of the time (at least as much as I now live in email), that makes me effective, that gives me what I want, that is my Intranet (in fact we all deliver content to the community/Intranet/portal (whatever)). If you give me that as a user, I will take it. It will not be an adoption issue, because it's the way I work. That's how Vannevar Bush thought in 1945 (http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/194507/bush) – can't we get there now in 2010??!!
Rolf