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August 4, 2005

Collaboration Success or Failure

Today, most organizations are implementing some form collaborative applications. These applications include shared documents, shared content management, groupware, corporate blogs, etc. What factors impact the success and failure of these efforts? More importantly, are these factors correlated? While I have not performed an extensive research program, I can draw on a couple of years of experience.

Failure will be related to the infrastructure. More specifically, the capacity and performance of the application will dictate the failure. Assuming the system selected has the basic business functions required, failure will occur when the system destroys the trust by not excelling in the operations and infrastructure areas. However, successful applications built over a solid infrastructure does not guarantee success. In fact, a solid infrastructure is only important when the need is not fulfilled.

Success is much more related to the client support and the business community acceptance of the technology. Therefore success in collaboration is related to the training, engagement processes, branding, best practices, user manuals, communities of practice, communications, and providing customer service.

So where does the vast majority of funding in this area go toward? You guessed it, the software, hardware, vendor relationships, capacity, etc. More importantly try to find a best practice document, vendor user guide, or a research firm review of the implementation of collaborative applications, you will find a rather large vacuum. Our community is obviously more concerned with collaborative failure than collaborative success.

Posted by Todd at August 4, 2005 6:06 PM

Comments

Posted by: Ed at August 8, 2005 9:54 AM