- Posts tagged collaboration
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SocialText Microblogging Appliance Delivers at Twitter for your Intranet
I've been really excited about this latest announcement from my company, Socialtext. So many organizations are looking for a micro-blogging platform, but don't want a.) it hosted in the cloud or b.) a full collaborative suite.
As a customer of mine said recently, micro-blogging is the gateway drug to social networking. Today it is 140 characters, tomorrow it is blog postings and wiki edits.
SocialText.
Come See Me in Chicago Next Week
Collaboration vs. Cooperation
Peter Tosh once famously lamented, in his song Equal Rights, everybody wants to go to heaven, but none of them want to die.
I hear from people all day long that are interested in sharing, but very few of them want to put in the effort to encourage their employees to collaborate. What it turns out, that they often really want, is cooperation with a fancy skin.
Sharing & collaboration are not the same thing as cooperation. Cooperation is something that you have to do in order for society (your company, your group, your organization) to function. You have to answer your phone, you have to reply to emails, you have to work moderately cohesively with your team in order to be productive in a knowledge environment. Let’s face it, in most cases, if you don’t reply to email or return phone calls, your business isn’t going to succeed and you aren’t going to be around very long.
Sharing, on the other hand, is something that people want to do. Very few people on the planet are forced to blog, forced to edit wiki pages or forced to share photos, yet everyday, millions of people share all of this. More importantly, people share ideas at work. Whether they are sharing ideas over coffee or sharing past learned data on future products, most people love to see their peers succeed, especially if they can succeed with them.
So why do so many corporate mandated collaboration systems fail? There are a lot of reasons, but, what I’ve experienced is that the mandates are much too broad. Companies want their employees to collaborate because they read about the benefits of sharing & collaboration in Wikinomics or some trade paper and want that. Like little (or big) boys outside the Ferrari dealership. They don’t know what goes into obtaining and maintaining a system. They believe that if they build it, they will come.
Unfortunately, most corporate mandated collaboration systems become just another way to cooperate. If your hobby is collecting widgets, you probably would graciously build a community around other widget collectors. You might even write a blog on widgets, share pictures of your widgets and help other people find widgets that they are looking for. You’d do it for free because you love widgets so much and you want others to love widgets too.
But the second that someone forces you to share everything that you like about widgets, you are going to stop doing it. It no longer becomes sharing and it becomes cooperation. The same happens at work. Companies believe in the idea of sharing and collaboration, but rather than provide tools to help facilitate this and let things run their natural course, they develop complex systems that force cooperation.
If you are interested in collaboration and sharing for your business (and who isn’t), define a measurable goal, keep the focus of collaboration niche – make small groups successful and the sum of the parts will be greater than the whole and identify technologies that will foster collaboration and sharing, not tools that force cooperation.
Trust me, your users will thank you.
