Collaboration remains a hot topic and is almost universally viewed as a good thing. A Harvard Business Review article on When Internal Collaboration Is Bad for Your Company by Morten T. Hansen from the April 2009 Edition challenges conventional wisdom by taking a closer look at the false assumption that the more employees collaborate, the better off it will leave the company.
To quote:
All too often plans involving collaboration among different parts of an organization are unveiled with fanfare only to collapse or fizzle out later. The best way to avoid such an outcome is to determine before you launch an initiative whether it is likely to yield a collaboration premium. A collaboration premium is the difference between the projected financial return on a project and two often overlooked factors – opportunity cost and collaboration costs.
Some collaboration initiatives actually destroys value and Hansen shares a few interesting case studies in his article, including the British government and Norwegian risk-management services firm Det Norske Veritas.
SharePoint is a popular tool for collaboration, but according to the New Zealand-based collaboration expert Michael Sampson:
“On its own merits, SharePoint fails the needs of teams for collaborative software in 6 out of the 7 areas”
I’m wondering whether collaboration is perhaps yet another area that is suffering from a combination of weak technology and lack of good strategy? If collaboration is a part of your intranet mantra, you might want to think a bit more about the new term “collaboration premium”.
Join our full day seminar, the International Intranet Day, on March 24 in Copenhagen, to learn from case studies from several organisations and network with other intranet professionals.
Dominic Cronin April 10th, 2009 21:16
For advocates of collaboration software, it’s business as usual. If the downside of collaboration is that it consumes resources that might have been better spent, then providing good collaboration software might shift the tipping point on a given project so that collaboration remains the best option.
Having said that, it’s a very good thing to challenge articles of faith such as “collaboration is good”. Show me the money.
Michael Sampson April 13th, 2009 21:16
Hi Janus … “collaboration” is merely a business strategy to get work done … better hopefully, than the alternative of people working alone or in isolation. Yes, there are downsides and costs involved, and indeed, it won’t work at a technology level if the human factors are wrong or stuffed up.
There are some simple rules around for determining whether a “collaboration” approach will work in a given context. James Robertson has a good list somewhere.
M.
» Collaboration in the cloud – Neil Morgan from the WWF voted best speaker at Aarhus 2009 - J. Boye » Blog November 26th, 2009 21:16
[...] to forget when we get excited about new so called “social” technologies. Sometimes in fact, collaboration can be bad for an organisation. As always with technology it pays to focus on business needs [...]