Enterprise Collaboration Architecture from Cisco that Goes Beyond Technology

Cisco provides a Collaboration Services Group that is not tied to Cisco products but helps clients with a vendor independent approach. Mark Eggleston, a member of this group I met at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference sent me a useful white paper by one of his colleagues, Joe Moran, Transforming Collaboration through Strategy and Architecture. The paper does not reference any Cisco products and is written to promote “an appreciation that technology is simply an enabler of collaboration, not the genesis of it.”

I found it full of good advice and very helpful for framing an enterprise collaboration effort. This is important since, as the paper mentions, Gartner predicts that through 2012 over 70 percent of these efforts will fail. Clearly help is needed. The paper begins with four trends that impact collaboration on an enterprise scale: borderless enterprises, workplace mobility, consumerization of IT, and information proliferation. In the latter case by 2020 digital data will grow to 44 times larger than it was in 2009. This is not surprising as I heard elsewhere that in 2009 more content was created than in the history of content and that the same thing had happen the year before.  So what can we do?

Most of what needs to be done is non-technical which was also a theme at the Enterprise 2.0 conference. Joe provides four key levers: strategy based on business issues, not technology, flexible architectural frameworks that can evolve with the organization, consideration of culture, and clear governance.  While these are good practices that have been around for a while, they are no less important now.  User adoption is a key success measure as the value of collaboration increase with the number of users.

Joe offers a detailed and comprehensive holistic collaboration architect that I will not attempt to convey here but it made sense to me. One of the issues I found helpful was the distinction between collaboration-enabled applications and collaboration-integrated applications. The former provide collaboration capabilities within the context of existing applications and likely require little training and have less adoption issues.  The latter are completely new applications created through mashups. The adoption curve is higher here but the impact may also be more meaningful.  Part of the strategy development process is to determine which of these options works best in what context. Joe goes on to suggest that planners ask if collaboration capabilities be exposed or embedded within other applications or services.

The three main steps of developing a collaboration strategy are defined as business alignment, process and organizational analysis, designing target business initiatives.  This makes sense, as does the rest of the paper.  If you are interested in enterprise collaboration, I suggest you take a look at this paper. There is much more detail that I conveyed here.

 

Comments

[Rex Lee]

Thanks for the post Bill. It is definately a major challenge for Cisco and all vendors of collaborative technology to market a seperate agnostic approach to collaboration strategy and architecture. I am 100% sure that in the back of every prospect, they are thinking... But is it really agnostic?...

[bill Ives]

Rex

Thanks for your insightful comment. Nice to hear from you. Bill

[John Maloney]

Bill –

Thanks for your post. This so-called white paper is utterly ridiculous. Sad to see how little progress has been made. The only surprise here is the conservative claim that ONLY 70% of enterprise collaboration efforts will fail outright. Anyone reading this BEWARE, you actual failure rate will be closer to 100% if you read or follow this revolting rubbish.

This technology-led, or the paper’s lame codeword, 'architectural,' approach to collaboration is patently incorrect and will fail with more like 100% confidence.

Isn't anyone else shocked with this utter nonsense? Why even bother with a paper on "Transforming Collaboration Through Strategy" and leaver OUT the Number One way people collaborate: face-to-face authentic conversation.

Collaboration is NOT a process, technology, architecture or strategy. Collaboration is a complex human behavior. This paper is particularly pathetic from a company that use (abuses?) the tag line, “The Human Network.” Good grief.

The vulgar, dehumanizing, technology-saturated, anti-social enterprise described here needs LESS collaboration IT technology and more, a LOT more human conversation.

If you want to know what the future of the social enterprise really is, try this --

RT @fonetworks: The Social Enterprise w/Wiig, Dixon, Krebs, Jooste – http://bit.ly/aLy92A

Thanks again. Apoplexy always beats caffeine to start the day!

-j
http://twitter.com/jheuristic

[Courtney Shelton Hunt, PhD]

Bill - You've done a nice job of summarzing Joe Moran's white paper and have validated many of the points I make about the best ways to approach leveraging new digital technologies. I'm sharing this post with the Social Media in Organizations (SMinOrgs) Community. Thanks.

[bill Ives]

Courtney - Thanks for your comment. I am glad you found the post and the white paper useful. Bill