Why Use Collaboration Tools?

Earlier this month, while I was supposed to be on annual vacation (!!), I posted the first edition of the “Why Collaborate?” infographic. There were a bunch of reasons covered in the initial version, and earlier this week, we released the completed edition with input from a number of readers. It was great to have your participation in the infographic, and the differing perspectives made for enlightening reading. Actually, last week in the United States I met one of the people who contributed an idea – that was cool.

In light of the completed infographic, let’s now ask a different question: Why should we use collaboration tools? By collaboration tools, I’m thinking of the various products and services that support the communication and interaction requirements of people when they are collaborating. Richard mentioned some of these tools recently, including Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Lync, Dropbox, Skype, and more. The topic of collaboration tools can easily consume a lot of words, but if you want more about the different technologies specifically, see Chapter 2 in my recent book, Collaboration Roadmap: You’ve Got the Technology – Now What?.

If we look again at the Why Collaborate? infographic, there’s a whole collection of reasons why collaborating is beneficial. The issue, however, is that given the realities of business and organizational life today, the nature of collaboration has changed. For example:

• Decisions have to be made quickly, often based on input from many people working in different office and field locations.


• People have to interact regularly with the people they work alongside, only the “alongside” is separated by time zones, countries, and even continents.


• Problems have become more multi-dimensional, due to globally integrated supply chains, just-in-time manufacturing, global marketing, and workforce diversity.


• Expertise has become more fragmented, as the stock of knowledge expands rapidly. The half-life of information is shrinking. Two people who both trained as chemists (or engineers, or information scientists) are often unable to speak together in knowledgeable ways, because each has studied different aspects of a large discipline.

These business and organizational realities coalesce to mean that we frequently have to work with people with whom we are not physically collocated. And more than that, that we have to work with a broader and more diverse set of people than would happen without the above major trends.

Based on this, there are four reasons why we should use collaboration tools:

• To connect people with the other people they already know, and provide a conduit for communication and interaction. An example is placing a phone call, joining a conference call, or sending an email message.


• To connect people with information from other people they already know of, so as to benefit from their perspectives as stored in documents, reports, blog posts, and more. An example is subscribing to the blog written by another person, to keep track of what they write and express.


• To connect people with information from other people they don’t already know, and to either use the information to answer the current issue, or to use the information as a springboard to interaction. An example is searching for expertise, knowledge, or a stated position about a specific issue. The searcher knows the issue they are interested in, and are seeing what they might find.


• To connect people with other people who share common interests or attributes, but where each person doesn’t know of the existence of the other. This is about serendipitously discovering other people inside or outside of your organization who share an interest with you.

For quick reference, I’ve tried to capture these ideas in the image above (click for a full-sized version).

Are there other reasons I’ve overlooked?