Over the course of my career this question keeps popping up. Because collaboration is a behavior, and even using new Web 2.0 technologies the benefits are often indirect and intangible, so it is a hard question to answer. Certainly the simple ROI tools that many of the web conferencing companies tout, that show how much you are saving on a meeting because you did not fly there and are using their tool, are good, but not sufficient. That ROI argument will hold for about 6 month, in the mean time you need to come up with more reasons that prove the current or future collaborative technologies are not only the right thing to do, but will save money or make it easier to make money. This is especially true in today’s recessionary environment.

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So how would one measure the value of collaboration? In one sense it is “invaluable” because it connects you with someone critical to your business (be it executive or customer). It is not easy to balance the cost of the collaboration technologies against this one conversation or relationship, yet intuitively you know this is the case, and now that you have it you can’t live without the collaboration tool.

Value is a subjective term, but one way to look at value is benefit over price. In other words if a tool gives you more benefits (notice I did not say features) at less cost, it has more value. There are 4 major benefits that collaboration offers:
1. Saving time or money (tangible)
2. Increasing quality (tangible…but less so)
3. Innovating and/or providing decision support (tangible but less than quality)
4. Easing access to and interactions with subject-matter experts (intangible)

About 10 years ago I looked at this question in a white paper called “The Black Hole of Collaboration” which looked at collaboration value much like an astronomer would look to discover a black hole. Since black holes absorb light, the only way you can detect one is the effect it has on objects around (near) it. Collaboration is much the same, you have to measure things affected by collaboration like: employee turnover rate, morale, cycle time to complete a task or process. These more objective measures then have to be linked to collaboration in some way and given a value for how much they contributed to a positive outcome (which is very subjective).

I am currently looking at other ways to value collaboration by looking at how it affects other behaviors. How well it supports the interactions with others, does it support accountability, does it help complete projects, etc. Whatever way you choose to value collaboration, it is no easy task.