What exactly is 'collaboration' - and who owns it ?

This article is mostly prompted by internal discussions within my group at work, but also because I have been reading Prof. Andrew MacAfee's book on Enterprise 2.0. Also in the bigger picture it links back to some posts from late last year on the TiMAF definition of information and information management, because your definition of what constitutes collaboration will impact on who the 'owners' are.

To set a little context, we have been taking about business ownership models for SharePoint (MOSS 2007) in our organization. Our CIO is very much focused on IT providing a service to the business and as such we always look for the 'business sponsor' or 'business owner'. For SharePoint specifically this an issue due to its both its broad feature set, and in no small way due to the Microsoft marketing which depicts it as a tool which 'the business' can use with a lot of help from IT.

So how about splitting up SharePoint's major features does that help? Well it may do, because it might be fairly easy to find the business sponsor for records management functionality, or for business intelligence features. I suppose document management might be more difficult to find a single owner because of its broad scope, unless you have an ECM strategy which in turn has a business owner/sponsor.

Collaboration however is a much more nebulous beast. What exactly constitutes collaboration may change depending on the organization or even the circumstances, and who might want to stand up as the business owner of something so ephemeral ?

At the Open University 'collaboration' was part of our ECM programme, but to be honest that was only collaborative workspaces, wikis, blogs etc not the 'communications' tools such as the Exchange email servers which belonged to a well established group. However we did 'own' collaboration to the extent that we wrote the collaboration strategy, and guidelines on which tools should / could be used for which collaborative endeavours. However as ECM Programme Manager I was also 'co-owner' of our corporate intranet, and in many organizations Corporate Communications (or whomever else) might step up and take the collaboration space because of its links to the intranet. On the other side of the coin I have worked as a consultant with Corp. Comms executives who vehemently insisted that any form of collaboration tool, web based or not, was well outside of their remit.

Throw in newer collaboration related 'phenomena' such as Enterprise 2.0 and things can get even more complicated. Prof. McAfee suggested in a recent post that overusing the word 'social' was a great way to kill your E2.0 initiatives before they even get started (make sure you read all the comments to get the full discourse). Those who decry “social this and social that” as over use of an empty buzz word seem to have forgotten the reason collaboration is so important is because we are social animals, and we like to work together (there are of course sound evolutionary reasons for this !).

So at this point I would suggest that part of the solution is to accept that there is no such thing as single amorphous blob labeled as collaboration – but many contextually different elements to collaboration, each of which may lend itself to a different type of technology or tool, to a different type of management, and even to a different loci for 'ownership'. As a starting point, lets look at the Wikipedia definition of collaboration:

“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.” (click for the full definition)

If we then acknowledge that we must concentrate on people, process, content and context for successful collaboration, and that dividing collaboration into synchronous or asynchronous is too simplistic, how else might we categorize or collaborative endeavors towards our common goals?

The following five sub-categories are my suggestion for slicing and dicing it to help it make sense:

Messaging Centric Collaboration: The lowest common denominator or fall back position for many, this category includes not only the use of email for collaboration (with all the bad practice this entails, such as large CC lists and attachments) but also Instant Messaging and SMS texting tools.

Content Centric Collaboration: Working together to create or edit a particular item (or items) of information. A good example is the Document Library centred approach of MOSS 2007, where the discussion forum, project blog or even the wiki is used to provide collaboration around the creation of content in MS Office formatted ‘documents’. Other ECM or DM products generally support this mode of collaboration through commenting directly on documents etc.

Conversation Centric Collaboration: The focus is not any particular content item, but instead on free flowing, creative discussions, often between geographically dispersed teams or individuals. Also often used in a ‘knowledge management’ focused scenario, tools might include blogs, wikis and instant messaging.

Process Centric Collaboration: Enhancing a particular production process workflow by adding a collaborative element. This may include discussion with teams or individuals up or downstream in the process workflow, or the collaborative brainstorming of issues causing exceptions in the process etc. For example in the EMC Documentum workflow tools there was a feature that would automatically create an eRoom workspace, assign users to it and email them a message with a link to the workspace and information on the process exception !

Collaborative Management: The co-ordination of programs, projects or processes via collaborative interaction, for example using team workspaces, team calendars and collaborative project management tools.

My colleague Martin White, Managing Director of Intranet Focus likes these definitions (we used them when working together for the UN Secretariat) and he uses them with his clients. As I publish on this blog under a Creative Commons license, feel free to use them too - but this leads to my first question to any readers who would like to comment:

Does this way of splitting 'collaboration' into constituent parts look helpful to you ?

My second question links back to my mention of our internal discussions:

Who is the 'business owner' of collaboration in your organization ?

Enteprise Search - its not just the technology

I had a great chat with Martin White of Intranet Focus today, he rang me from the UK. We worked together on various elements of the intranet and search projects that were under my pervue at the Open University.

He debriefed me on the Enterprise Search Summit 2008 in New York, for which Martin gave the keynote. He later sent me his slides so I could have a read myself. Now Martin's knowledge on search is encylopedic, and we have had many chats on various elements of the subject and it turned out that we had similar opinions about search and ECM, i.e. that sorting out search problems or enteprise content management problems are as much about planning, governance and building teams of people to 'manage' the technology - bottom line, as per usual its all about people and not the shiny new software.

Martin puts emphasis in his presentation slides about building a team to manage your search, when I was presenting on the OU ECM programme I would always be sure to emphasise the size and breadth of the multi-disciplinary team brought together to implement the strategy. Martin has posted a summary of the conference and some of his thoughts here.

Now this also fits with Prescient Digital Media's advice on implementing or improving intranets, that there should be an emphasis on planning, governance and 'managing'. Indeed to push the theme even further Toby recently posted on the Intranetblog on the Pro's and Con's of Sharepoint, qouting Shawn Shell, the author of the new CMS Watch Sharepoint report. Shawn's advise on how to ensure success in deploying Sharepoint also focuses on what might be called 'soft' aspects of information systems project management.

OK, so non of this is 'rocket science' to me, Martin, Toby or Shawn, but if your a newly promoted IT guy (hey, I've been there !) who's been told to implement Sharepoint, or buy a new search engine, the change management, people management and information management (metadata, taxonomies, classification schema's, 'findability' etc) aspects might be a long way from the top of your task list ! When it comes down to it they may not be at the forefront of the CIO's thoughts either.......

Having been involved around the periphery of a big CRM programme, and having watched colleagues do data warehousing and BI etc, non of this is specific to 'unstructured data' - but, time for the blatant plug (!) if your doing ECM, Intranet, CMS or search projects, Prescient can help to ensure you have the right executive backing, the right governance structures and the right team in place to implement your projects.