Some of the Issues with Enterprise Collaboration Strategies

In working with large enterprises like BT, Logitech, General Dynamics, and  Network Appliance, I have seen a lot of similarities in the process of creating a corporate collaborative strategy.  In general it is IT that instigates this process, but sometimes it is from management.  In several cases it was a new CIO that was the impetus for this change.

Generally when we do our initial assessment (built special tools for this) we find that there are many different collaboration tools that are working OK, but not always meeting all the collaborative needs.  Often those using these collaborative tools don’t know what they don’t know!  When I explain there are tools that will do that, and show them their eyes light up and often there is a big smile on their face. Then we have to figure out the best strategy to integrate these new tools into the plan.

The usual impetus for these projects is to consolidate and standardize the many collaborative systems found in most organizations today.  I remember looking at Oracle before they built their own collaboration tools, and they were using 11 different web conferencing tools.

The best way we find tobegin these projects is to put together a team of stakeholders (sales, marketing, operations, HR, IT, R&D, etc.) and understand each group’s specific collaborative needs, examine the tools supporting them, and then do a GAP analysis.

Don’t let anyone tell you collaboration is not political, it is always political! Often the big decisions with entrenched vendors get kicked up to the CEO, if not by us, the vendors themselves do it.

There are a lot of pitfalls inherent in the process of creating a corporate collaborative strategy… more on those in a later blog.