Harvard Business Publishing

At last week's meeting of the Working Knowledge Research Center at Babson, one of the topics we discussed related to internal collaboration and collaborative technologies. I had previously argued to this group that "focused collaboration," or collaboration initiatives with a clear target group, clear set of business objectives, and assistance from the organization in implementing collaboration, was the only kind that was likely to work. I realized at this meeting that I was only half right.

We also talked about social media as collaborative tools. The companies who seemed to be having the most success with them were using them either as purely social tools or infrastructural devices. At one professional services firm, for example, they'd implemented an internal Facebook, but the primary goal was to help people make friends at work. As I have argued in another post , this isn't a bad idea at all. A defense contractor said they had used a Facebook-style application to develop an expertise directory. Fine with me, as long as you populate it with as much information as possible from transaction systems. This feels like infrastructure to me, and it's hard to object to. Both such uses of these social tools aren't "focused collaboration" as I've defined it above, and they don't have hard-core business objectives. But they might do some good as long as employees don't get obsessed with them.

So there are your two options: focused collaboration with clear business objectives, or collaborative tools for social or infrastructural purposes. Where organizations get in trouble is when they venture into the muddled middle between these two options. They throw out some collaborative tools--either new-style social media like wikis and social networks, or old-style tools like Notes or Sharepoint or ERoom--and say, "go forth and be collaborative." They don't insist on a collaborative objective or business benefit, but they still somehow expect business value. They seem to assume that just because a technology is available, it will lead to collaboration, and that the collaboration will yield an ROI. I've seen countless instances where this hasn't worked, and very few where it has.

Perhaps the underlying issue is that collaboration for business purposes is real work. It needs to be managed like any other project or process. Having a technology to facilitate the collaboration makes it easier, but it's still work. Social networks for social purposes, on the other hand, are fun. Infrastructural collaborative tools are only a little bit of fun (if everybody puts in a lot of juicy details about their kids, your hobbies, your pets, etc.), but they are intended to make organizational life more efficient. It's when we don't have a clear understanding of what's work, and what's fun, that we get into trouble.