Myths of collaboration
KMWorld in October published a supplement on Best Practices in Collaborative Knowledge Sharing, containing six articles on various aspects (primarily technical) of knowledge sharing and collaboration. The piece the caught my eye was editor Andy Moore's opener - The Power of Jointness. It describes research from MITRE, and some conventional wisdom associated with technologies around knowledge management and collaboration.
I thought this list of “lessons learned” about collaborative efforts would shed some light on the following essays. So says MITRE: “Conventional wisdom would have one believe that successful technology insertion must follow six hypothetical guidelines:
- The organization’s culture must naturally support collaboration.
- Exhaustive requirements analysis is needed to ensure success.
- You need broad high-level management support.
- The information technology (IT) infrastructure must be accommodating.
- Build it and they will come.
- You need a lot of money to deploy collaboration technologies.”
But here’s the kicker: “None of these guidelines proved entirely true in our experience.”
He goes on to describe the reason why these things by themselves are not necessary for successful collaboration. The article is based on a MITRE report from their February 2000 The Edge Perspectives: Collaboration Solutions that Make a Difference (pdf). The report in question is "Collaboration Technology Insertion: Disruptive Technologies Challenge Conventional Wisdom" by John Davidson, and it starts on page 6.
Interesting perspective in the article. In essence, all of this conventional wisdom points at a deeper need for collaboration technologies to work. What is driving your organization? What is it that you are trying to "do?" These are the things that will drive the success / failure of the technology. Conventional wisdom is a good guideline, but be sure it makes sense in your circumstances.
2 Comment(s)
Jack:
In our experience an assumption that "culture will be a barrier" turned out to be partially wrong.We found that there are cultural sweetspots that have already bought into the change idea.The challenge is to get the success stories from here and disseminate it across the organization.Better,if it happens through word-of-mouth and horizontally rather than top-down.
"This" is the future my friend. However, to react quickly you need timely and accurate information and by the way it really helps to have decision support tools when you are dealing with thousands of pieces or information. The '90's were all about fully integrated and ERP/MRPII tools. It was a great leap forward in managing the business in total, not isolated pockets or efficiency/inefficiency. I think this decade will be about taking all those great or not so great ERP systems and use them to make globally optimized decisions. For example, a customer places an order. Traditional ERP systems would have a single source for that customer and you would ship from there. This is locally optimum, but is it globally optimum? By not looking at all the pending orders on the books, you may rob the inventory for another order that is much more expensive to source from elsewhere. This is one of 1000's of decisions that business can optimize on from forecasting, production, inventory management, transportation, etc.