What Is Collaboration?

Words matter here.

And I'm starting to notice two distinct modes of thinking as people approach this topic.

You're going to have to pick what's important to you, I think.

Here goes.

Document-Centric Collaboration

This is the world we live in today, for the most part.  I send you something, you make edits, you send it along.

Sometimes we use big repositories and workflows to do this.  As an example, EMC sells Documentum, which is perhaps the best example of ECM (enterprise content management) of this approach.

The goal of the collaboration is a document -- a written thing that ostensible gets published and managed through a lifecycle.

I think Microsoft's SharePoint is very document-centric, as an example.

But I think that this approach ignores the "social" part of "corporate social media".  (More on that second term in a later post).

Conversation-Centric Collaboration

What I've learned from our experience here is that there's an entirely different collaboration mode -- conversational.  People talking to people.  Finding each other.  Sharing ideas, experiences and perspectives.  Arguing about stuff.  Agreeing about stuff.

Maybe that results in a document, maybe it doesn't.

But -- think about this for a second.  How many times in your professional life were you working collaboratively on a deliverable (maybe a document), and you got to the end of the process, and there was a big difference of opinion, or an entirely new perspective that came to the party late?

I would offer than "conversation-centric collaboration" lays the groundwork for effective document collaboration.

It's pretty hard to have a meaningful discussion using "track changes" in Microsoft Word, as an example.

The value proposition of this style of collaboration is distinctly different than document-centric collaboration, IMHO.  The use cases are far different.

So we shouldn't use the same word (collaboration) to describe two entirely different animals, should we?

A Great Conversation With The Jive Team

Our Jive sales rep set up a nice concall with some extended Jive team members.  Marketing people, development people, etc. 

Now, I knew he was trying to close a deal (remember, I work for a large IT vendor), but I was able to share some thinking and get to a productive discussion of some core ideas.

We talked a bit about how they'd arrived at a term -- social productivity -- to describe what they do.

That's a pretty good description in that it's accurate, and it sets them apart from the buzzword smog that's inherent in this part of the industry.

The other thing we discussed is focus -- do you see yourself as managing collaboration around content, or managing collaboration around social interaction?

If you choose "collaborating around content", you'll be up against some of the biggest names in the industry -- IBM, EMC, Microsoft, et. al.

If you choose "collaborating around conversation", you won't have a lot of established competitors.

And I'd argue you want to target where the market is going, rather than where it's been.

All a healthy discussion, to be sure.

But There Are Implications For My Readers ...

You want to manage document collaboration?  You're going to go down one path.

You want to foster interaction and socialization?  You're going to go down another path.

And, right now, the market does not appear to offer any reasonable solution to do both well.

We chose the "social" part of social media.  So far, it's been an outrageous success.

What's your choice?

Comments

[Howard Lenos]

Actually, there is an effective marriage of both document and conversation centric collaboration with continuous content improvement thrown in. A Wiki. This very simple technology does a very profound thing. It combines incremental knowledge capture with conversational persistence.

I believe that it's important to keep the following three criteria in mind when assessing social tools.

1. Level of interaction
2. Persistence of information
3. Re-usability of content

Thanks for the post.

[Chuck Hollis]

Amen.

What we've found is that most people are treating wikis as static objects.

The social protocols around editing, contributing, approving, etc. -- well, that's a work in progress!