Database: Academic Search Premier
KNOW YOUR ENVIRONMENT
When choosing a collaboration tool, you need to know your workplace culture and environment. What IT infrastructure is in place already that you can leverage? Are there financial and human resources available to purchase, install, and maintain an application? You need to know the users and their requirements. Are they early adopters of new tools? Will they take a chance and invest a bit of time? Are they skeptical and risk-adverse? Do you need to start with a leaner, easy-to-use tool to build demand for more advanced features, or is your user community demanding more granularity, security, and workflow options?
Who are the stakeholders and champions? Can they communicate the value of the new collaboration tool?
DEFINE YOUR REQUIREMENTS
Three requirements are paramount in choosing the right collaboration tool for your environment–communication, sharing, and management.
How frequently do people need to communicate? What types of communication is preferred–asynchronous or synchronous–text, voice, or video? What access is needed to previous communications?
How often do groups want to share documents and other digital objects? Do they need to do this in real time, or can material be shared in a document repository? Is it a community of trust? Can everyone see and edit all materials, or how granular do your permissions need to be? Is there a complex approval process or a simple one? Will documents be created collaboratively in the online space or with external desktop applications that are added to the system? Is version control needed?
How many users will be involved in more than one group or collaborative space? What degree of standardization from group to group is required?
COLLABORATION AND SOCIAL SOFTWARE
Collaboration tools such as Weblogs, wikis, and instant messaging open up the possibility of allowing organic self-supporting and self-organizing to form beyond the firewall. Many organizations aren’t ready for a bottom-up approach in which individuals seek to affiliate with others of similar interests. Think about how we use IM. We add our buddies, create our own groups, and organize them to meet our personal and work goals.
Your intranet team will need to carefully assess your workplace culture to find a good match between organization needs and the different collaboration tools. Sometimes bottom-up tools such as wikis and Weblogs will work best. In other cases, a bulletin board or commercial product developed to cater to the needs of communities of practice or portal toolkit is the best match. Keep in mind that you probably will need to provide a suite of tools. It’s unlikely that one tool will work for all. Take time to explore new collaboration tools so you’re ready to help out the next team or group that wants an online collaborative space.
Comments? E-mail letters to the editor to marydee@xmission.com.
