Supporting Successful Collaboration

Successful organization-wide collaboration does not happen by chance. While some areas of the organization rapidly embrace the use of collaboration tools and get immediate value, others will struggle (or fail). I’ve been working with Microsoft’s collaboration tools for about eight years now and I’d like to share with you some of the risks of rolling out collaboration tools and give you some practical advice on how to make collaboration succeed for your organization.

Rolling out collaboration tools is not without risks. In fact, my experience has been that without careful planning and organization of collaboration spaces, the organization as a whole may find that they are more confused and lost when looking for content. When collaboration spaces are scattered and left unmanaged, users aren’t sure which collaboration site contains what they are looking for. Furthermore once they arrive in the collaboration site, they lack context to understand what they are seeing.

“What is this file? Where is the final version? How does it relate to the other information in the site?”

This fragmentation of corporate content is only partially solved by search tools.

There is another aspect to planning and organizing collaboration spaces, information lifecycle management. Some organizations are moving away from their unmanaged shared network drives to collaboration spaces, not realizing that they continue to lack the policies and procedures for managing their information and are at risk of carrying forward the same problems they are moving away from.

So, what can we do to support successful collaboration? First, we need to have a corporate content blueprint or information architecture. This information architecture organizes the collaboration spaces into areas that represent the organization, making it easier for users to find content. It also gives them context or communicates the purpose of the collaboration space. For example, an organization may have content that can be divided into the following categories:

• Ad hoc teams doing project work
• Groups working on the stated corporate initiatives
• Departmental teams developing their operational procedures/best practices
• Users developing reports that are reviewed by a board of directors

Getting agreement from key stakeholders on the collaboration space’s information architecture and communicating how corporate content will be organized is a key success factor.

Developing an information lifecycle policy for collaboration spaces and giving users procedures that support the policy is another great way to support successful collaboration. The policy should be used to address the following lifecycle issues:

• Ownership. Define who owns the collaboration space. This can be difficult when it is an ad hoc team working together.
• Document Lifecycle. Define which documents, developed within the collaboration space, are part of the corporate record. Create a procedure for publishing content to a records repository where it is properly maintained and shared with the entire corporation.
• Collaboration Space Lifecycle. Define when sites will be archived and the length of time they will be kept.

In summary, the information architecture and lifecycle policy for collaboration spaces should not act as a roadblock slowing or even preventing the spread of collaboration tools within your organization. They are designed to help make collaboration work better and be a more effective tool for your users.