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Collaboration best practices: Think big to act small
The dos and don'ts of rolling out group productivity tools

By Anthony Plewes

Published: Tuesday 08 June 2004

What comes naturally to small businesses can be an organisational nightmare for larger firms. So it's no surprise that many are turning to collaborative software tools to encourage staff from different departments and job functions to work together more effectively. All they have to do now is ensure people use it properly, says Anthony Plewes.

Read more stories on collaboration in silicon.com's special report.

Collaboration is increasingly becoming the foundation of good working practice. Even roles such as product design, which requires a great deal of solo effort, are encouraged to come together at regular intervals with peers and other staff in the design and production process to brainstorm, compare designs, test prototypes and so on.

Smaller companies tend to collaborate as a matter of course. The same cannot be said for large distributed organisations, particularly when there is an element of outsourcing involved. Duplication of effort, left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing or endless revisions are typical symptoms of companies where effective collaboration is low on the agenda. Workers within big businesses typically need a little support and encouragement to collaborate effectively, and that's where collaborative software can help.

"Collaboration tools replicate the interactions that humans have," says Mike Davis, senior analyst with the Butler Group. "Smaller organisations share information all the time, but large or highly distributed organisations require collaboration tools."

Although there is a range of products described as collaboration, they all fulfil two key functions: allowing teams to share and synchronise information at any time, irrespective of location; and enabling the creation of electronic workspaces so that groups can work together in real time.

Collaboration tools are not new; in the 1990s many companies seized on the collaborative benefits of Lotus Notes and deployed it throughout the organisation, but few companies realised the hoped-for benefits.

"This blanket deployment created a chaotic environment because everybody became an application developer," said Ashim Pal, collaboration expert with analyst firm Meta Group. "It created a massive headache for the IT department. The mistake is to roll out the products horizontally and assume that there will be a direct benefit from putting a toolset on the user desk." This can turn into a very expensive failure especially if user licenses have been paid on a desktop-by-desktop basis.

For collaboration technology to be effective, companies need to understand the kinds of interactions that happen within their business, both internally and externally with partners, customers and suppliers. Collaboration is a process and the tools need to be geared towards supporting these processes.

This does not necessarily mean that each different process requires a different piece of collaboration technology. "There are capabilities that can be provided on an enterprise-wide basis," says Nikos Drakos, research director at Gartner. He suggests that a good approach is to choose strategic collaboration tools and be ready to roll them out when the need arises. Tools such as workspaces or web conferencing can even be offered on a third party-hosted basis, removing the need for any direct capital investment.

Still, there will always be situations where specialist tools are required, for tasks such as project management or product design. Companies can now box much more cleverly with collaboration than a few years ago, mainly because the market has matured considerably. There are many tools available to allow companies to segment out the required functionality.

"The best approach is to standardise around a service-oriented architecture," recommends Pal. "This allows you to embed modular collaboration applications in the architecture." This approach is being taken by many vendors, such as IBM with its Websphere product, or Plumtree with its portal architecture.