Technology Confined Collaboration?

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Technology Confined Collaboration?

My role at Groove Networks allows me to meet with hundreds of people whose job it is to apply technology to collaborative practices. These practices have been identified as the keys to unlocking innovation (making more money) and driving efficiencies (saving money) within their organizations. I am constantly amazed at the stories I'm told, most centered around failures in getting people to collaborate.

The folks at the big software companies would have you believe that software is always pristine and perfect, and that organizations and their staid cultures are the barriers to reaching collaborative nirvana. Don't believe the hype. When it comes to collaboration, technology (and more precisely, technology architecture) can doom the best laid plans around enterprise collaboration.

I was at a major motion picture company in Los Angeles some months back and had the opportunity to meet with the CIO and the IT staff that manages their worldwide collaboration offerings. The majority of the time was spent discussing how people work and the benefits around impacting the cost of connection. We then dove for the gold: collaborative practices that would make them more responsive to revenue and market opportunities. With every mention of specific work practices, one particular lady from the IT staff would say, "we have web collaboration product X for that." This went on for 20 minutes when I finally asked for a pause. My previous role was that of Director, Product Development in the KM Products Group at Lotus, so I have seen a large number of collaboration installations. Never, had I seen an environment that thrived as much as this one. Every division was using web collaboration products to further the corporate mission.

I had to ask the question: "So, how many of these virtual web places do you have running?" -- Pause -- "Today, or yesterday?", came the reply. "Pick the high water mark from the last 6 months," I replied.

"Four...", said the IT person.

After the CIO picked himself up off the floor, we spent the next 15 minutes talking about why so few. It wasn't culture. It wasn't anticipated reciprocity. The IT lady summed it up best when she said, "web collaboration doesn't work the way people do." Technology was confining the natural human collaborative process. This particular product was forcing these folks (all 26, 000 of them) into working with a fixed set of tools, which was the real problem. If your problem didn't fit almost exactly into the function set the tool provided, you were forced to change the way YOU work. Compound this by being forced to work within the firewall and the need to have IT set up a space and the point is made.

Collaboration is about people. Collaboration needs technology frameworks that support adaptive, ad hoc interactions. Adaptive from the sense of extending functionality on the fly and securely embracing new members on the fly. Simply put, it's the swarming culture fused with adaptive technology.