The goal of a collaboration platform is not necessarily to create a positive and enjoyable workplace. Those are side benefits. Christian Buckley outlines some great use cases in an article from CMSWire, but what is the real driver of collaboration? What struck me is his honest description — the bottom line is about making the company more profitable, productive and efficient.
Buckley’s use cases highlight the importance of focusing on business needs. Let’s take that one step further; it’s essential to fuel the design and adoption of collaboration or social enterprise solutions.
The business need allows the strategy and implementation teams, defined in your governance strategy, to tie all of their actions back to the original benefit that was expressed by the organization. Without this connection many users will have the perception that an initiative has been built in a vacuum as “collaboration for collaboration sake.”
Not only does Buckley focus on the business need, but this article emphasizes that the actual technology used to implement the business need is a far second in importance in building a collaboration strategy. He points out that the act of putting technology in front of the creation of use cases is a high contributor to the failure rate of IT initiatives.
How does this apply? Imagine an executive who is enthralled by the latest and greatest cutting edge technology, so s/he works with the IT shop to purchase and architect a system that will “fit every user’s needs.” Implementation, roll-out, training and the result is no buy-in of the tool. This is a common scenario where technology is put in front of business need, and not tying the purchase into expected benefits.
On top of the power that use cases can bring to the success of a project, a collaboration strategy is not complete without governance. Another misstep of deployments is to use governance to explain “what the user can’t do.” Instead, use those same clear guidelines, standards and decision-making organizations to describe the benefits of the system. It’s possible again to re-use the use cases to define how users will connect with information, data and peers across their organization.
What we’ve seen is that there’s a drive toward more business cases and systems supporting business needs. That’s great, but the truly successful implementations go one step further and tie those business needs into benefits for the employees who will have to use that tool. That in turn feeds user adoption and, in the end, it’s better for the business and better for the employees.
Source: CMSWire, July 2013
