Five Biggest Blunders to Avoid
with Enterprise Collaboration
Contents
The challenge of finding the right collaboration solution ............ 2
Five biggest blunders in choosing a collaboration solution ........ 2
#1: Overlook the key point: helping people work together .......................... 2
#2: Assume adoption can be mandated ........................................................ 3
#3: Assume everyone works the same way .................................................. 5
#4: Fail to liberate information ....................................................................... 6
#5: Grossly underestimate Total Cost of Ownership ................................... 6
About Socialtext ............................................................................... 9
Socialtext Page 1 www.socialtext.com
The challenge of finding the right collaboration solution Collaboration solutions, based on wikis and other Web 2.0 technologies, can dramatically reduce decision cycle times and improve organizational effectiveness. But a collaboration solution only produces these results to the extent it enables conversations to move quickly towards their goal while tapping the right people and surfacing the right information. Since the product category is new, it can be hard to know what to look for to make sure the solution you choose will afford the true potential that a collaboration solution can deliver. This paper is designed to help you focus on the areas most critical to collaboration solution success, and to avoid the five biggest and most common blunders others have made when choosing a collaboration solution.
Five biggest blunders in choosing a collaboration solution
#1: Overlook the key point: helping people work together The way work gets done is by people working with people, "bouncing ideas" off each other, tapping into each other's expertise, leveraging each other's knowledge and insights, and re-purposing each other's output. A common blunder is to undervalue this human element and miss the most fundamental opportunity provided by a collaboration solution: to help people work together better. Following is a list of the most valuable capabilities that facilitate this human element and that should not be overlooked. Get a rich picture of the people behind the work Any collaboration solution you consider should give a rich picture of the people behind the work. It should connect people and give them a full picture of each other. When people have the context of the who, what, when, where and why of the others they are working with, it builds the level of trust they have in each other and results in greater teamwork and higher quality work. Help people get to know each other Profiles in the social collaboration solution should truly help people get to know each other, with content such as photos, background, experience, expertise, interests, links and stories. Profiles should reveal who the person is following so others can learn from their network, and what they've been working on most recently so others can learn what they're up to. Profiles should include tags; both the tags a person gave him/herself and tags others gave him or her. Profiles should also show the workspaces in common between you and the person, as this provides further relationship context. Discover others who could be valuable A great deal of the value of social networking comes from A collaboration solution connections with all the people not directly involved together on a should provide a variety formal project, what sociologist Mark Granovetter calls the "strength of easy ways to make of weak ties." Until recently, collaboration solutions have focused on associations & form making "strong ties" - active working relationships - efficient and connections that might effective. But it is "weak ties" that can unblock and accelerate group not occur otherwise. productivity. These connections offer new perspectives, ideas and
Socialtext Page 2 www.socialtext.com
insights. The collaboration solution should provide a variety of quick and easy ways to make associations and leverage weak ties to get work done faster and yield more informed and innov... [download for more]
