There are now many instances and business cases of the adoption and deployment of collaboration software. What interests me is the number of stories of how collaboration turned into simple file sharing and how the company is not getting all it could from the installation. There are lots of stories about the technical aspects of the adoption, but only a limited number of detailed accounts of the business side utilization and the effectiveness of the technology in satisfying business goals.
What I often hear is “it ended up being a shared file server, and it didn’t do it all that well”
The other thing about collaboration that one typically hears in most presentations and discussions is how collaboration was adopted following an ad-hoc or grass roots model. As noted in much of the Enterprise2.0 discussions, it is suggested that grass roots models rely upon the “wisdom of crowds”. More so, the point is often made that it originates from a single spark which then expands over time.
Given these two points, the question is: How did grand visions of collaboration end up as a shared file server in light of the power of the wisdom of crowds?
From my experience, you cannot totally rely on the wisdom of crowds. I have observed business cases in which unrestricted access to tools led to excitement among users and rapid growth of the tool. However, the rapid deployment caused segmentation of teams as each sought to develop their own ideas for the “best way to do something”. It didn’t develop hierarchically from the bottom, but sprang up everywhere, then went amorphous.
The good news was that these groups all tended to focus on the primary issue at hand, which at that time, was “can’t find stuff”. This consistent attempt to solve the same problem suggested that there was indeed wisdom in the crowd about what needed to be done, but not in how to do it. Also, the wisdom did not spread as past problems of communication and inabilities to integrate remained, and limited the ability to organize the grass roots effort.
Executions are badly flawed when multiple approaches emerge, and worse, the methods implemented simply mirrored the existing bad practices. Result show a great many sites that contained lots of documents, but with no structure and very little, if any integration. The underlying trap that became apparent was the focus on fixing my problem, rather than a cogent approach to broadly managing, sharing and exchanging valuable business assets.
In the long and short of it, many business adoptions ended up being quite the mess. And as noted, I continually hear about similar business cases in which “XYZ tool ended up just being a file server”.
So I ask the question again, how did grand visions of collaboration end up as a shared file server in light of the power of the wisdom of crowds?
For related discussion see my post on Enterprise2.0 adoption models
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