Collaboration Is Hot: Why Now?
Collaboration may be the hottest trend to hit the enterprise this year. But what makes it so hot? Why now?
According to "Benchmarking Your Collaboration Strategy,"
a new report from Forrester Research, two key trends make collaboration important to the enterprise right now:
The amount of content that people produce is morphing, especially as the advent of social computing becomes more commonplace.
Second, inefficiencies are swamping the enterprise with the need to create collaborative strategies that provide a more structured approach to how information is managed.
Four Key Factors
Innovation: The poor economy is playing an important factor in how companies view the ways they develop products. Management is looking for more efficient and creative ways to innovate. And they are looking to Web 2.0 technologies for answers. According to Forrester, discussion forums and idea management tools are the top two Web 2.0 technologies being considered and piloted by IT decision-makers this year.
Efficiency: Information workers are high-paid, valuable members of the enterprise. But they have a hard time finding information to get their job done, with 83% saying they waste time searching for information vital to their work projects. There is growing importance for tools that provide the ability to better find information and connect more easily with co-workers who can provide expertise to solve problems and drive efficiencies.
Email Woes: A huge need is emerging for better ways to reuse information that normally would be lost in email communication. Email is used to share information but it only goes so far as the people in the email chain. Once in the chain, it's locked away. Changing email behavior is no easy task but collaboration technologies hold promise for more information to be shared throughout the enterprise.
Governance: Managing business information is becoming a legal necessity. Communication is becoming so widespread that it is becoming difficult to track. According to Forrester, only 20% of businesses report that they're very confident that if challenged, they could demonstrate that their digital information is accurate, trustworthy and accessible.
Benchmarking For Success
Forrester's report is designed to provide a framework for building a collaborative practice in the enterprise. Senior level executives came to understand in 2009 the need for better collaboration. In 2010, we expect structured formats like what Forrester proposes will be increasingly important for successful implementation of collabortion technologies in the enterprise.
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Hi Alex,
link to the report is broken.
link to Forrester Report: http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/Excerpt/0,7211,48336,00.html
I wholly agree with your comment regarding "Email Woes". As a corporate user of email, I find a huge amount of reusable information is simply lost in email. So much of the information would be good for others (outside the original email chain) for reference / look up. It's also getting so much harder for just for individuals who have archived said email chains to quickly search and track through that information. I look forward to a collaboration technology / platform (maybe Google Wave) that will help share this lost information.
Alex, Excellent points.
I would also say that changing working practices will add even more impetus in this direction. Given the state of so many economies the pressure will mount to reduce headcount and/or office space. Couple that with a growing awareness from people that they can use social media tools to foster 'Brand Me', and the rush to embrace collaboration tools will really gain traction.
We built our Glasnost21 product initially to help us run our own distributed business, and it really does work. Open and transparent access to information does wonders for productivity.
The other reason? market rate of change is such that we need decisions to be made closer to action, not waiting to go up and down hierarchy of organization. The companies that can act flat regardless of their size end up delivering faster, etc. In other words, collaboration is both an outside-in (market forces) and inside-out (we want btr ways to access our own information) phenomena.
I like what http://kohive.com is doing - I heard a pitch from one of their guys, explaining how LinkedIn etc... obviously isn't built for native collaboration, yet they're adding collab layers onto their platform through native. Kohive has built the collab platform from the ground up, not for everyone, but 100% collaboration.
Aren't we missing the fundamental piece of collaboration being 'hot'?
Because technology has allowed us to communicate in different ways electronically, we have forgotten how to communicate in person, when it matter; more efficiently and effectively!
What if our interpersonal collaboration had developed as well as our electronic. At CollaborationKing.com we are striving to share the best interpersonal collaboration (with some electronic thrown in of course!)
One of the top idea management tools is offered by Brightidea. With clients like Cisco, HP, Adobe, etc. the company has been forging the way in this space for over ten years.
@mark
Capturing useful emails in a wiki is one approach I've seen work pretty well. MindTouch (for example) has an Outlook plugin that allows one touch publishing to the knowledge abse, where it can be accessed by everyone. I believe that this mode rather than the 'publish all' works better for email as people can publish completed threads against the project pages, and you don't get overloaded with the dross that flys around on email as well.
I'm not suprised to see discussion forums mentioned as one of the top categories, but I believe a moderated discussion workflow that uses a wiki page comments section (MindTouch again works really well for this) to collate comments around the subject, then is assigned to a user to create an exec summary of the discussion once it's closed in the main body. This surfaces relevant content much faster as it's there at the top of the page, and you don't have to trawl through the threads to find it.
Reads like an advert for MindTouch.com I'm afraid, but that's the system I've implemented so that's what I'm familiar with. Hope that helps. I'm sure you can achieve similar with Confluence, Sharepoint, and some of the others mentioned above, but we went with MindTouch because it's so easy to get into for users and admins. They just launched a cloud version you can get into and start messing with instantly. I recommend checking it out!
The 2009 Forrester Research Wave: Collaboration Platforms report does a nice analysis of the leading vendors' products. The report covers: IBM, Microsoft, MindTouch, Open Text, Webex and others. It is pretty pricey regularly ($1749.00), but MindTouch purchased the rights to redistribute this for free, in entirety. You can get your free copy of it here: http://campaign.mindtouch.com/Forrester_Wave
Enjoy! :-)
Oh, and THANKS Nathan for sharing your MindTouch experience! :-)
Amazing conclusions: FORRESTER recommends that “enterprise IT promotes more effective collaboration that supports and improves existing email-based collaborative behavior while also facilitating the adoption of new and more efficient tools”.
This is why products that are able to work with people's usual e-mail while structuring, centralizing and sharing e-mail conversations have a bright future. They will set the link and bring mailspaces to SharePoint and the like...
Well thats really lovely.I don't actually think benchmarking in collaboration makes it so hot, even i don't think it is the hottest trend.I liked reading this blog, lovely debate.