Forrester recently issued a new report, The State Of Collaboration Software Implementations: 2011 by TJ Keitt with Matthew Brown and Joseph Dang. The report noted that while organizations are actively investing in collaboration tools to support their increasingly decentralized workforce, 62% of companies say that these tools still mainly benefit travel and corporate communications. The reported noted that, “only 9% of businesses report that collaboration technology has impacted their time-to-market for new products, with improved innovation and partner relationships also ranking low on the list.” I was pleased to receive a review copy.
Why is this occurring? Forrester report author TJ Keitt offered this explanation. “The tipping point for gaining benefits related to flexible working styles is after a business deploys four or five collaboration technologies. But more collaboration technology alone isn’t a magic elixir. Collaboration pros must work in conjunction with the business to set policies that help information workers use these tools to do their jobs.” He adds, “To realize benefits of collaborative business processes, though, (implementations professionals) must work to integrate these tools into business processes like product development and workflows.”
This makes sense. If you are mainly using collaboration tools to support virtual conversations then travel reduction is likely the big benefit. To get the really big benefits in other areas you have to explicitly go there. You usually get what you ask for, at best.
This was the case with knowledge management. The only really successful KM efforts that I saw were ones that were aligned with business processes such as product development or customer service. In these aligned cases, I saw documented benefits such as reduced time to market, increase in successful cross selling and reductions in repeat calls on the same service issue.
Despite the limited returns, a significant number of firms still see the potential of collaboration technologies. According to the report, 46% of businesses reporting upgrades or net new implementations to team workspaces in the next year and 42% spending on social tools like blogs and wikis. Real time communication is being added to the desktop with new investments in desktop videoconferencing (33%), unified communications (32%), instant messaging (30%), and web conferencing (31%).
Let’s hope they target these investments at specific business processes and not simply general communication. There is more in the report to guide these efforts.
Hi -
The problem here is people have been saying the same thing for 30 years. This silly conversation, and the dopey research is driven by vendors. That's a huge issue.
What about telephony and email? Heck, what about conversation? These account for 99% of all enterprise collaboration.
What about coming to work? Sitting? Getting dressed? Microprocessors, networks and display technology? Smart phones? Furniture? Again, all essential to enterprise collaboration and content. Guess what? They don't need research or 'alignment' either.
The classic 'reducing travel' chestnut has been tossed around for years and years. What a farce. In reality, business travel is growing sharply and airports are packed. Good grief. Travel is an infuriating red herring.
•In 1986, 75% of the knowledge that a worker needed was stored in their heads.
•By 2006, that number was estimated to be 9%. The needed information is no longer in the worker’s head but it is “out there” in the minds of others.
This fact is the sole driver of enterprise collaboration. It's not vendors and their specious research reports!
Software collaboration is now transparent, a fact of life. It doesn't need fancy research, it doesn't need alignment or claims of it being a separate class of offering. Software collaboration is the wrong unit of analysis. It's obsolete as a unit of analysis, that's all.
"It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them." - Alfred P. Whitehead
Please, please, the less we think about collaboration, the better, a LOT better!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_North_Whitehead
-j
Posted by: John Maloney | May 26, 2011 at 06:10 AM