Central Desktop

Adopting Collaboration

Michael Sampson — Thu, 13 May 2010 21:21:01 +0000

What’s the number one complaint about new collaboration technology? No one uses it! The business case has been written and approved. The infrastructure has been deployed and made available. A training class or two has been completed. But the people who are supposed to make use of the new technology don’t. Instead, they ignore it, continuing their previous ways of working. What a waste of money and effort on the behalf of the IT department! What a waste of an opportunity on the behalf of the users!

As part of a multi-year project to better understand how to overcome the user adoption challenge for collaboration technology, I recently ran a global survey on user adoption strategies. The intent of the survey was not only to discover which strategies people were using for user adoption, but also which ones they found most effective. The results are in, and they’re startling! There were over 400 respondents to the survey, and each had a lead role to play in setting the user adoption strategy for their organization. The most commonly used user adoption strategies are among the least effective for bringing about change, and the least commonly used strategies are among the most effective for bringing about change. It’s time for a revolution in our approach to user adoption. In this article, I look at the responses from organizations using Central Desktop and SharePoint, but while this article looks at two specific tools, the findings are generalizable.

The Central Desktop Respondents

Central Desktop is an online team collaboration and Intranet solution. People from over 200 organizations using Central Desktop responded to the survey—but note that just under 85 percent of respondents came from organizations with less than 100 employees. The most commonly used strategies were Web-based training, pages on the Intranet, and over-the-shoulder watching. See Figure One for a chart that ranks the use of many different user adoption strategies.

Now compare these results with the strategies that are actually effective in user adoption (See Figure Two) Web-based training is one of the top most effective strategies, but notice the others that rank highly that aren’t commonly used. For example, “Real-to-Life Scenarios” was ranked eighth (8) in being used as a strategy, but is the fourth most effective strategy (48 percent of respondents using the strategy said it was either “Very Helpful” or “Extremely Helpful”). Likewise for the “Zero Other Options” strategy: it is one of the least used strategies, but it ranked third in effectiveness—49 percent of respondents using the strategy said it was either “Very Helpful” or “Extremely Helpful”.

Later in the survey, the focus shifted to probing respondents about strategies that worked well for them, and what they would do differently if they were to start again. The results here picked up on the earlier questions, but respondents mixed in a healthy dose of their own advice too. In ranked order, what worked well in user adoption were the zero other options strategy (Central Desktop is the place to work, and we have closed the alternatives), making it real (to talk about and demonstrate the use of Central Desktop for the real work of people and teams, rather than focusing on generic capabilities), and using people of influence to drive interest and adoption (if senior executives were actually using Central Desktop, rather than just talking about it, it was very powerful, and sent the signal that executives could learn to use it, and they had, so it must be important), among others. When asked what they would do differently, themes ran the gamut from making it real (as above), gaining a better understanding of the service upfront (so the lead internal champion of Central Desktop could make effective recommendations about how to use it), and better initial training for end-users, among others.

If you want to learn more, there’s a complete report on how Central Desktop organizations approach user adoption: “User Adoption Strategies: The Central Desktop Approach.”

The SharePoint Respondents

I mentioned that generally smaller-sized organizations were using Central Desktop. Before you discount the above analysis, consider this: there were almost 200 respondents from organizations using Microsoft SharePoint as their collaboration tool, and the size of organization involved was much larger on average. Almost 30 percent were less than 100, 15 percent were between 101 and 500, 10 percent were between 501 and 1,000, and another 20 percent were between 1,001 and 5,000 employees. The interesting thing is that the results for the SharePoint analysis were not all that different.

“Pages on the Intranet” was the most commonly used strategy, but was the least effective! The most effective strategy was “Over-the-Shoulder” watching (65 percent of respondents using the strategy said it was either “Very Helpful” or “Extremely Helpful”). However, it was only the fifth most used strategy. Some strategies, while not so commonly used, are effective when they are used. For example, “Real-to-Life Scenarios” was ranked ninth (9) in being used as a strategy, but is the second most effective strategy (50 percent of respondents using the strategy said it was either “Very Helpful” or “Extremely Helpful”). Likewise for the “Zero Other Options” strategy: it is one of the least used strategies (ranking 12th of 13), but it ranked sixth in effectiveness—36.8 percent of respondents using the strategy said it was either “Very Helpful” or “Extremely Helpful”. And extremely interestingly, the most frequently mentioned strategy in the free text answers about strategy effectiveness was one-to-one coaching, and this for organizations running SharePoint!

As with the Central Desktop findings, a complete report on how SharePoint organizations are approaching user adoption is available. It’s part of my work around governance for SharePoint: “SharePoint Roadmap Governance Themes: User Adoption Strategies” in the reference section.

Encourage User Adoption

Organizations spend a ton of money on the technology and infrastructure to support collaboration between people, but too often don’t put any intentioned effort or thought into how to encourage user adoption. This article has outlined the most effective strategies for user adoption of collaboration technology, based on a recent survey. Now that you know what’s effective, go and do the effective things!

Archiving and eDiscovery for Collaboration Systems

Michael Sampson — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 18:49:24 +0000

Archiving and eDiscovery for email are a well-understood, even if not so well-practiced set of requirements; but compared to the current status of archiving and eDiscovery for collaboration systems, it’s the gold standard. In the email archiving space, there are many vendors and signs of market maturity. For example, the acquisitions to consolidate capability and acquire new technology. There are also examples from courts where email evidence has been critical, and given the back-and-forth conversational and interactional nature of email, archiving email messages is not hard.

Life is a bit more complex when it comes to collaboration systems though, and for our purposes, that means systems like SharePoint, Lotus Quickr, Lotus Connections, Oracle Beehive, Central Desktop, Socialtext, and many, many more. What follows is a look at current regulations, a discussion about archiving and eDiscovery for collaboration systems, and some thoughts about what this means for organizations.

Regulations

A wide range of regulations and statutes require organizations to safeguard and manage complete records that document what happened in a business or organization. Financial services companies are subject to SEC and FINRA regulations, life sciences organizations to 21 CFR Part 11, federal government agencies and defense contractors to DoD 5015.2, and companies publicly traded in U.S. markets to Sarbanes-Oxley. Common among these regulations and statutes is the concept that the subject matter determines what needs to be managed, and not the medium used for transmitting or communicating information in the record. This means that business decisions communicated through collaboration systems are just as relevant for records management as a printed contract. A second point of commonality is that a complete record is required, not a haphazard or partial one. And third, once a record has been captured and stored, it must be safeguarded from unauthorized change, and if it is changed, an audit trail of all changes must be maintained. The courts have demonstrated a willingness to enforce compliance with records management regulations, and there are steep costs for non-compliance.

Beyond compliance with external regulations, though, there is a need to ensure a complete business record is maintained for legal discovery. For companies dealing with litigation matters, the cost of locating and retrieving the requested records can rapidly rise to hundreds of thousands of dollars per request. Organizations with appropriate record management strategies, systems, and procedures can minimize these costs.

Archiving

Collaboration systems are not exempt from archiving requirements. In fact, as more and more work gets done inside collaboration systems, there will be a greater need for archiving what was discussed, agreed, and promised. Organizations with SharePoint are well supported in their quest for archiving what takes place inside collaborative team sites. AvePoint, EMC, Metalogix, Mimosa Systems, and many others provide archiving add-on tools for SharePoint. For example, AvePoint DocAve Vault—AvePoint’s archiving tool for SharePoint—will automatically copy and store all SharePoint records and metadata without any need for user intervention. End-users continue to do their work, and DocAve Vault stores a record of what they did. EMC Documentum Archive Services for SharePoint, EMC’s offering, will copy or move content out of SharePoint 2007 and into Documentum for archival purposes.

Other collaboration systems are not so well supported by archiving vendors. IBM supports archiving a complete Lotus Quickr space, not individual items therein, although ZL Technologies does support more fine-grained archiving of Quickr activity. Central Desktop, 37signals Basecamp, Socialtext and more all take the same approach: you can archive a complete space/project/ wiki, but item-level archiving is not supported out-of-the-box. It gets more complex in the wiki world too. What exactly does archiving mean for a wiki? Does it mean that you have to archive every page edition, and the metadata of when it was valid, and which people read or saw that particular edition? That’s going to get messy very quickly.

eDiscovery

One main purpose for archiving your electronic records is to prove what was or wasn’t said to others; hence the need for a complete business record. Basic requirements in eDiscovery involve searching for electronic items that match a discovery request, and then creating a legal hold on those items. A legal hold means that any standard disposition (automatic deletion) policies may not be applied to content under the legal hold, and that all items under the legal hold are unable to be changed or modified, unless a full record of those changes are maintained. Some collaboration systems support eDiscovery requirements out-of-the-box, some can be integrated into third-party products for eDiscovery, and some are an open question (or an eDiscovery nightmare, depending on how you look at it).

In SharePoint, the out-of-the-box Records Center site enables content to be copied from other collaborative sites, and then broken down by type of content and stored in a records center. This means that the collaborative working out of the document or item happens in a collaboration team site. Once the document or item has been completed or finalized, or some other way subject to workflow or timing, a copy of the document or item is made in the appropriate Records Center site. Within the Records Center, there are capabilities for Legal Holds and more. Equally, organizations with SharePoint can elect to integrate with third-party records management systems, and use the capabilities of the wider platform for eDiscovery and legal holds.

Closing Thoughts

Because collaboration systems are becoming such an integral part of doing business, it is important to also include these systems when complying with regulations and eDiscovery requirements. Now is the time to do your due diligence about which regulations you have to comply with, and then to ensure that whatever systems you allow to be used within your organization can meet these regulations. Further, when selecting collaboration systems, be sure to include supporting archiving regulations and eDiscovery requirements as a part of your upfront decision criteria.