Let’s collaborate…

[Sean Lew]

First of all, I apologize that I have been quiet for almost a month. Some unpleasant things happened and I had to attend to them.

I have been having alot of chats with various parties on collaboration and its really funny how this buzzword has a different meaning to different people. First up, there is no way you can implement a platform and tell people to “collaborate”. A successful collaboration platform is very difficult to achieve however, its failure is generally not well publicised as collaboration platforms generally starts of as a pilot and if it fails, its canned. No pain to the company at all, few thousands dollars went down the drain but a lesson well learnt.

Collaboration is a mutually beneficial and well-defined relationship entered into by two or more parties to achieve common goals. The relationship includes a commitment to mutual relationships and goals; a jointly developed structure and shared responsibility; mutual authority and accountability for success; and sharing of resources and rewards. With this, collaboration is not just technological platform - its just a means to an end.

Interesting enough that one of my close colleague and friend brought up the case that alot of collaboration platforms have failed and its unable to engage the community. This is due to the lack of understanding of the concepts and a overly strong focus on the technology. Technology is important, but just like building ERP solutions and SCM solutions, requirements must be understood! Business culture must be understood! Human behaviour must be understood! Personally, I feel that understanding the specific requirements of collaboration is extremely difficult as its not just the business needs but the individual needs and fit into the overall culture and environment.

Sometimes, collaboration might not be the best option and even if its the best option, we need to understand why various parties would like to participate. Freak success stories like Wikipedia is not going to happen again. That is a Excellent success story but you can create another Wikipedia now and expect it to work with the same success rate. We need to understand the incentives for each party, the responsibilities of each party and many other minor details.

I have reviewed the Enterprise 2.0 implementation success factors post I wrote a while back and I still think the model is extremely very valid. I hope this will help improve the success rates of collaboration platforms across the world.



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