Is There Tension in Enterprise Collaboration?

I am cross posting this from the Fast Forward blog as i would like to get your perspective. Is there tension in enterprise collaboration? Is collaboration and business processes an oxymoron.? Bruce Lewin writes the blog, Four Groups and he recently posted a long piece on The Tension in Collaboration. He started with these four questions:

Should we be putting people first, before technology, in our efforts to collaborate?

Does collaboration benefit from a more formal process?

Can collaboration be encouraged in a replicable and systematic manner (as much as anything concerning people can be repeatable and systematic)?

Does the lack of a formal process for optimizing collaboration hold back productivity and performance?

Bruce begins with the Wikipedia definition of collaboration (abbreviated to “recursive process where two or more people work together toward an intersection of common goals”) and notes that Google offers 26 different definitions and many of them have a nature of informality included. He summarizes the issue with this statement, “an inherent contrast lies at the heart of organizational collaboration, namely how to manage and ‘control’ something that is by definition informal, ad hoc and spontaneous?”

Bruce notes that the new enterprise 2.0 facilitates collaboration and all the technology providers are moving in this direction. I agree with built in collaboration features make spontaneous collaboration more possible and likely. But Bruce says that more is needed and I agree here, also. Business processes need to allow for “gaps” where collaboration can occur and not be an enemy of collaboration in the name of efficiency.

People are the most important component. To optimize their participation, Bruce feels that training, motivation, and trust are essential. There is much more in the post. I appreciate the recognition that there is tension between informal collaboration and formal business process. The enterprise 2.0 tools allow greater opportunities for collaboration but businesses need to enable these moments to occur. It is not technology alone.

Have you seen this tension in operation? What has happen and what can be done?

Post Script see Jack Vinson's Dealing with process and practice around collaboration for an extension of this conversation.

Comments

[John Maloney]

Hi -

Not only is there tension, there is a lot of pain. The simple reason is that people are NOT put first. The enterprise focus on collaboration is now so dysfunctional it is akin to deploying an accounting or procurement system. It is a foolish and overbearing focus on tangibles, transactions and, most harmful, processes. People are seen as costs! Ridiculous. This craven and puerile approach to enterprise collaboration is widespread and fails with confidence. Look how Tim O’Reilly defines Web 2.0, “Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as platform.” What a breathtaking farce!

Enterprise collaboration is pervasive, in spite of enterprise efforts. Collaboration inhabits, thrives in ubiquitous informal networks. It is specifically based on the intangibles you mentioned like motivation and trust and many, many others like reputation, relationships and perspective. Until intangibles are prioritized, visualized and optimized, and there is a remedial focus on value networks, expect little understanding, competence or leadership for enterprise collaboration.

The fastest way to oblivion is the to try to force-feed a collaborative strategy or application on the enterprise. It is a pull, not push model.

Finally, these 20th century process approaches to complex networks create a severe ‘forest for the trees’ problem for enterprise collaboration. See:

http://valuenetworks.com/public/item/212230

-j

[bill Ives]

Jon - Thanks for your long response. You certainly right that collaboration has to be people focused and not simply an IT issue. Bill

[jackvinson]

There is always tension between technology, which almost requires formality (due to the way we implement), and the interaction of human beings. Interactions of almost any sort between people do not follow all the rules all the time. This is why technical solutions that don't recognize all the surrounding human behavior frequently fail or do not succeed as wildly as hoped from the outset.

[Samuel]

I also see and experience this tension. To give you 2 examples: Sharepoint and wiki roll-out. You often see these kindof projects get rolled out as IT projects. So, you give employees the technology and let all else go. "The employees are not stupid, they'll use it in the right way". There is little focus on why the organization should use a collaboration tool and what type of tool is most productive. Furthermore, really helping employees to use the tooling effectively is mostly skipped to. You get some feature training and that's it.
On the other hand, pure people-projects also exist. They try to really understand users and the way they work. IT helps by offering different tools for different needs.

[bill Ives]

Samuel

Thanks for your comment. I find these projects need to start with people and have them involved in the design. Then the rest works it ensures that the tech addresses needs and those involved spread the word to others. I always amazed and yet dot surprised that these old style IT approaches still exist even after they have been disproven over and over again. Bill