11/20/2006
As we’ve stated before, the three main categories of business needs which should be addressed when implementing a business collaboration strategy are People, Process, and Technology. They can be compared to the legs of a 3-legged stool; if any of the legs are weak or non-existent, then the stool will tip over immediately… much like a poorly-planned collaboration strategy.
Another very important component which should not be ignored, however, is Purpose. For the stool to be useful to everyone, it needs to have a purpose.
The power, flexibility, and ease of use of modern online collaboration tools can sometimes be a double-edged sword. If the usage of online collaboration within your organization is not well thought-out, it can quickly become a huge mish-mash of useless information. Purpose, however, can become your compass, providing direction, motivation, and a standard against which you can measure your success.
People with years of successful online collaboration experience — or experience with any business solution — will say that a shared sense of purpose is critical. When planning for online collaboration, it’s important to ensure that you have buy-in from managers, stakeholders, and team members. If any of these people don’t take your collaboration strategy seriously, then the bottom will soon fall out, and your collaboration tools will begin to collect dust.
When planning your purpose, try asking these questions:
- What’s in it for the managers and stakeholders? Most collaboration strategies need upper-level sponsorship to succeed, and most managers and stakeholders need to have a clear view of how it meets their business objectives.
- What’s in it for the Team Members? Remember, they are busy people, and if the collaboration processes and tools that you put into place are confusing, cumbersome, or they don’t make the Team Members’ jobs easier in some way, then they will discard what you’ve put together.
One example of a well-accepted purpose could be to share best practices within an organization, with the goal of adding 20 new practices to the organization’s knowledgebase during the next six months. This is explicit, tangible, measurable, and it provides benefits to everyone involved.
Another example could be to provide remote workers with the data and documents that they need to service their clients while traveling. We could then set a goal to migrate a certain number of document templates and client data into an online environment over the next six months.
Once you’ve surveyed the appropriate people in your organization (the more, the better) and established the purpose of your collaboration strategy, evangelize it. Make sure that everyone knows about it and understands it, since the best strategy in the world isn’t any good to anyone if they don’t know about it. 10/30/2006
What’s the difference between Knowledge Management (KM) and Collaboration?
Although some people might use these two terms interchangeably, they definitely have different, yet related definitions. Generally speaking, Knowledge Management is a much broader term which can be defined loosely as the practice of gathering, creating, and distributing knowledge within an organization. Collaboration, on the other hand, is a slightly more specific term, describing the act of two or more parties which work together toward a common goal. In this context, Collaboration refers to creating and updating pieces of business information, such as a document or a set of data.
Based solely on these brief definitions, one might think that KM and Collaboration are really not closely related after all. But what if you were told that Collaboration processes and tools can actually be considered to be a subset of KM? Here’s how…
From a process perspective, if we focus on the first two parts of the KM definition from above (gathering and creating information), this starts to sound a lot like Collaboration… which is the act of two or more parties creating or altering a piece of business information. The business information entity might be a document, a set of data, or merely an idea for a new product or process improvement. Once the parties have created or updated the entity in question (thus the Collaboration effort is complete), then the overall process typically moves into the storage, sharing, and distribution KM phases (assuming that the resulting entity has some business value to a larger group of people outside those who participated in the collaboration effort).
Grey areas can often exist when trying to define the difference between KM and Collaboration, especially when we start to look at the tools that people use in both areas. Microsoft’s set of SharePoint technologies, for example, is sometimes referred to as a set of online Collaboration tools, allowing people to share and collaborate on documents and data, yet it is actually flexible enough to accommodate all of the KM processes described above. Not only can people create and update collaboratively using SharePoint, they can also store their works centrally and securely in online repositories, as well as publish them for others to see and use. 10/9/2006
We’ve heard it time and time again:
KNOWLEDGE IS POWER
…and although many companies state that knowledge sharing is important to their business, culture, etc., in most cases, the opposite is really happening.
Information hoarding — where people do not want to share knowledge because they see knowledge as a source of power — is very common, and can happen for various reasons within any given business environment:
- People feel that an injustice has been done to them
- People are distrustful of co-workers or management
- People are retaliating against someone else’s behavior toward them
- The organizational climate encourages secrecy, not sharing
In order for business collaboration to work effectively within a company, this ever-so-common barrier needs to be torn down.
How, you ask?
People are more willing to share with those who they trust and who treat them fairly. When organizations emphasize positive relationships and trust among employees, knowledge sharing will become part of the culture. Here are a few ways to promote knowledge sharing — not hoarding — within your company:
- Emphasize positive relationships and trust among employees
- Explain the mutual benefits of having colleagues share their knowledge
- Treat all workers fairly and respectfully
- Make knowledge sharing part of the culture
In many cases, it will be difficult and it will take time, but the resulting benefits will be well worth the effort. Remember… implementing a new business collaboration strategy involves more than sending out a mass email message or adding a few paragraphs to an employee handbook… something of this magnitude involves a cultural change. People are distributed all along the bell curve of new process and technology adoption, from those who are very accepting of change to those who will avoid it like the plague. The key is to find the switch that turns on the light in each of their heads, allowing them to see the big picture and how knowledge sharing really does benefit them. |
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