There’s a broad range of collaboration tools, with a variety of enterprise use cases.

The market is segmented between suite and pure-play social vendors.

Employee activity feeds

Social tagging

Effective collaboration is essential for knowledge-intensive organizations where teams are the primary creators of value. Knowledge-based networks are replacing hierarchies.

Collaboration is going social as vendors add social tools to their more traditional content management offerings. Pair traditional and social tools for maximum effectiveness.

Centralized

Bureaucratic

Focus on command and control

Distributed

Flexible

Built by employees

Focus on leveraging knowledge and expertise

Designing around collaboration patterns will ensure both traditional and social collaboration tools fall into place properly.

There are a wide variety of collaboration tools, from traditional content management tools to new social tools like employee activity feeds and microblogging.

Voice-based communications require both parties to be available simultaneously, which can create scheduling headaches. Attempting to “talk through” document edits and content creation can also be more cumbersome than other tools.

Allows knowledge workers to shift attention to non-urgent issues to off-peak periods, allowing for improved productivity.

Content management solutions are more effective than e-mail for document-based collaboration; they impose order on what can be an otherwise chaotic process (for example, endless back-and-forth revisions are nullified by version control).

Extremely popular for customer service and support, as well as internal collaboration among employees (for example, frequently asked questions forums that allow employees to pose questions to their peers).

High enterprise value for virtual meetings, distance learning, marketing, and sales.

Often overrated as a collaboration tool on the basis of detecting body language, especially when collaboration centers on documents and applications, not people.

Wikis excel at rapid maintenance of team-based enterprise content, such as service and support knowledge bases. However, the collaborative authoring model can be restricted to designated authors, rather than allowing all enterprise users to edit all content. This is a common misconception of wikis prevalent in the enterprise.

Taxonomies are process-centric, while collaborative tags are user-centric. They are not mutually exclusive and can be employed to complement each other.

Collaborative tags are usually presented and shared among users as “tag clouds,” where the most popular tags are represented in larger size text and the least popular tags are represented in small text.

Typically, an employee profile consists of basic information such as education and employment background, department and current projects. It may also include a list of relevant knowledge and skills, past projects, interests and hobbies.

Social collaboration tools provide the ability to include employee profiles when searching. This results in discovering employee expertise from a variety of inputs (as opposed to an explicit HR skills database).

Content that appears in employee activity feeds may be deliberately generated by the user (for example, “status updates”) or may be created automatically by enterprise applications (for example, a workforce management solution announcing via an employee’s feed that he or she is on vacation).

Department Meetings

Training Sessions

1-on-1 Meetings

Client Meetings

The key requirements of meeting patterns are:

Note taking (whiteboard, personal)

Decision making/voting

Document/application sharing

Action (follow-up) item tracking

Shared document library

Audio (unless collocated)

Video (unless collocated)

If a gap exists between pattern requirements and tools, procurement may be required. See Info-Tech’s solution set, Select the Right Collaboration Platform.

Don’t forget about the new features and tools your organization will be gaining automatically if SharePoint 2010 is on your roadmap!

The enterprise social collaboration market is now mature with Microsoft consolidating its social collaboration strategy in SharePoint 2010. A majority of organizations will have deployed social collaboration tools to employees by the end of 2011.

Mid-to-large organizations are poised to see the greatest benefits from adoption of social collaboration tools.

Don’t let your perceptions on external social media negatively bias your stance on enterprise tools.

Bring senior management onboard to help drive home the message that collaboration is a necessity. Manage the “value perception gap” between managers and employees.

Small organizations need to choose their collaboration goals carefully. If everyone already knows everyone else and activity updates can be performed by essentially yelling over the cubicle, then investments in collaboration technology may not produce the expected benefits.

There was a 27% difference in employee and management perceptions of employee interest

As a knowledge-intensive organization, senior management and IT recognized the benefits of increasing knowledge sharing and productivity through social tools.

In 2008, the organization rolled out a pilot project using a mix of traditional and social tools (content management paired with employee wikis). The project was a resounding success.

In 2009, FONA selected Socialtext for its full-scale social collaboration platform roll-out. Socialtext was selected on the basis of its strong social toolset and minimal infrastructure investment requirements.

Many teams that embraced collaborative tools are considered the highest performing.

In order to realize value from tools, they were mapped to collaboration patterns and embedded in the organization’s workflows.

Social tools helped create value at FONA by capturing knowledge “in the flow” (while getting work done) – i.e. by retaining knowledge generated by employee workflows, rather than “above of the flow” (intentional extra work) - which requires employees to set aside time to catalog their knowledge and activities.

Decreased time in connecting subject-matter experts to one another.

Increased capture, retention and dissemination of knowledge.

Tools that enable the same type of peer to peer network building among employees are enterprise-ready, but most enterprise collaboration strategies are not ready.

Vendors of collaboration platforms and enterprise applications (CRM, RP, etc.) are rapidly adding social collaboration tools to their products.

The majority of Info-Tech’s clients plan to upgrade to MS SharePoint 2010 within two years. MS SharePoint 2010 is tightly integrated around social tools and will force companies into social collaboration, whether they are ready or not.

Organizational hierarchies are valuable for resource management but are not sufficient as a framework for employee-to-employee (E2E) interaction.

Enabling employees and teams to form direct (peer) connections to other employees and teams, based upon knowledge and expertise shortens cycle times, improves knowledge reuse and builds long-lasting relationships between employees across organizational boundaries.

Social collaboration tools, used in conjunction with traditional collaboration tools, enable employees to share (syndicate) their expertise and activities and enable them to follow (subscribe to) the activities of other employees whose work activities are complimentary.

Understand what value social collaboration tools add to traditional collaboration in order to build or update the organization’s collaboration strategy.

Design collaboration strategy around common and repeatable employee collaboration patterns, not tools, to produce collaboration solutions that effectively blend social and traditional collaboration.

Review the current collaboration product market segmentation to make sound upgrade and/or procurement decisions from among the options of collaboration platform vendors, especially MS SharePoint 2010; pure-play social collaboration vendors; and enterprise application vendors (CRM, ERP, etc.).

Lack of communication means each team member has no idea what their teammates are doing.

However, Salesforce.com is now focusing its “Chatter” social tool on B2C, B2B and E2E collaboration patterns. Chatter enables social collaboration between the organization and its customers as well as exclusively among employees, such as collaboration among the sales force.