Socialtext White Paper Sample

Collaboration: We've been doing it the hard way

Collaboration is simply a series of conversations to get to a goal. It involves gathering people, asking questions, collecting answers and ideas, surfacing information, getting feedback on interim deliverables, and the like. It is the way most work gets done.

We’ve been collaborating for a long time, but we’ve been doing it the hard way. Using today’s business tools – email with attached documents – collaboration has been slow, difficult and ineffective. Topics get fragmented across many places – individual emails, different versions of presentations, excel files and word documents – stored in different desktop applications, shared drives and content management systems. Corporate employees spend up to 1/4 of their day looking for information, according to research firm IDC. The cost of this unproductive time can be as much as 25% of your staff costs. And according to a 2008 IBM study of 400 human resources executives, only 13% of people can find someone with a particular area of expertise in their own company. This means the bulk of work doesn’t leverage the specialized knowledge that exists right there in the company, because there is no good way to find it.

Collaboration solutions, based on wikis and other Web 2.0 technologies, are focused on solving these problems. But a collaboration solution only addresses these problems to the extent it enables conversations to move quickly towards the goal while tapping the right people and surfacing the right information. With the right collaboration solution, group productivity and organizational effectiveness can be dramatically increased, and decision cycle times greatly reduced.....