Investing in Collaboration Tools

Collaboration

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It is a huge responsibility to be charged with articulating and implementing a collaboration strategy for an organization. Fundamentally, it requires structuring the way that people interact with others. It comes with great power for good or bad. Therefore, before taking action consider these four key points:

Identify the key user groups in the business, and create scenarios of how they could work better through new and improved collaboration tools.
Understand the facts of the tools from the vendors, but define your own architecture.
Know what the exit strategy is for working with any vendor.
Consider what is involved in migrating away from the current environment.

Point One: Scenarios

Our work practices combine habitual ways of working with tools and technologies that have been around for a long time. One of the most common patterns of collaborative work is the combination of a Word document or PowerPoint deck being emailed around for comment. With the new technology available today, both for deployment inside the organization and as hosted services on the Web, this pattern can be swapped for something different. Documents can now be drafted in Google Docs, and colleagues can be invited to read, review and comment on the document without it ever being emailed about. There are benefits to the latter approach that do not exist with the former.

Taking this approach is called scenario planning. This is done by first interviewing the key user groups in the business to understand what they do. Then combine that analysis with an understanding of the new tools available for doing that work in a different way. This allows for some estimation about the benefits of working in the new way, as well as the costs of changed work practices to the people involved.

One of the key mindsets in choosing a collaborative tool is to find something that is flexible enough to deal with a wide range of end-user scenarios. By creating a new platform of commonality in tool availability and usage, things that work in one department can then be carried over and used in other departments. Put another way, skills picked up in one setting, apply to other settings. If the technology is too tightly focused on one or two use cases, then people will have to learn to adopt a multitude of tools, which is not going to happen. It also makes the movement and correlation of data between systems difficult, which makes the environment more complex.

Point Two: Facts and Architecture

“He that defines the terms, rules the conversation.” Vendors define their own architecture for collaboration and attempt to impose their view of the world on others. In so doing, they hope everyone will see the world through their perspective, and will thus become intellectually aligned with their products and services.

There is another way: Define the terms yourself. Create a reference architecture for collaboration that is centered in the needs and requirements of the people and teams in the organization. By all means learn from vendors about what they offer, but do not take the vision of one vendor as objective truth—it’s just their point of view. To help start on this process consider using the 7 Pillars of Collaboration, a vendor-neutral framework that I developed and wrote about for the January/February 2006 issue of Messaging News. There are other aids available too.

Once the architecture is defined, seek to understand the facts about the capabilities of the tools that are offered by different vendors. How do the products actually work? What can they actually do? What can they not do? Then array this set of facts against the reference architecture and see how well a given vendor meets the needs of your people and teams, and study the mitigations that will have to be made to cover over the gaps.

Point Three: Exit Strategy

When choosing a vendor and a product, know what the exit cost and strategy is likely to be. Be sure to select a vendor that meets your risk profile for systems that support core business activities. Just as email has become a mission-critical system, so too will the collaboration platform become a mission-critical system. This is not the place to skimp and save every penny, nor the time to align with a vendor that has insufficient strength to last for the long haul.

Another question is the local support infrastructure that will be available, not just at the corporate office, but in other places around the world. Where does your organization work today? Can the vendor or its business partners provide support in those locales?

Point Four: Current Environment

The final key consideration is to model what is involved in migrating away from the current collaboration environment. Very few organizations have a greenfields opportunity, due to current and embedded tools. Transition and migration costs on the IT-end are sizable, plus there are needs to re-train staff and administrators, or find new ones. More than one collaboration platform review has been cancelled because the costs of migration far outweighed the perceived benefits. Also consider what can be turned off as a result of your work. The aim should be to create a streamlined place of working.

Finally, be wary of assuming that you must shift to a new platform in order to rationalize your current information architecture. Some organizations that have shifted from IBM Lotus Notes and Domino to Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint, for example, have said how wonderful it has been to reduce duplication of information, to re-architect certain applications so that the information is better shared across the organization, and more. Yes, those are great outcomes—but you do not have to shift platforms to do it. It is possible to improve what you already have and reap the same benfits, although making a switch can give you more clout to get certain changes underway.

Consider Carefully

Deciding where and how to invest in collaboration tools is a process fraught with difficulty, because it requires understanding how people work together. The four points presented here should help save a good deal of pain.

For Your Reference

Messaging News writer Michael Sampson helps organizations improve the capability of teams that can’t be together, to work together. He writes at: www.michaelsampson.net.

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