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?
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