When you’re thinking about enterprise collaboration, it’s easy to focus on the technology tools, but it’s more important to first take a step back and look at how your employees collaborate. People have been collaborating for thousands of years, and it’s far more fundamental than the tools that enable it to happen more effectively, an article from CMSWire reminds.
That means that at the heart of launching any collaborative or social technology initiative, you truly do need to assess your organization’s current practices. The technology is really just a record-keeper or method of communication. No tool is able to replace the role that team dynamics plays in collaboration. Too much emphasis on technology takes the focus off of individuals’ traits and habits that make them effective collaborators.
With the right people in place, the key to successful collaboration is to gather and collect as much information as possible, and then present it in easy-to-understand manner for everyone to use in context with the organization’s mission. That’s what technology and collaboration solutions do best for modern enterprises — they enable people to make better decisions and improve productivity by removing friction in communication.
Also, in today’s fast-paced business world, organizations and their employees are moving faster and doing more. To be relevant, you have to do more with less. Technology is a tool to help allow for that while remaining organized. Collaboration platforms allow for real-time sharing across a large set of team members and also keep track of information so that it’s searchable later.
Keep in mind that many people already spend a lot of time communicating in these ways using consumer social products such as Facebook and Twitter. Leveraging those habits for enterprise collaboration isn’t necessarily easy, but might be helpful in creating a collaborative environment.
Just remember that technology alone won’t fix any problems or improve collaboration. You need to understand how your organization collaborates before mapping out how technology is able to augment and support your existing team dynamics.
Source: CMSWire, February 2014
