Let’s talk about collaboration as a team, really.

When I talk with an organization looking at Enterprise 2.0 style collaboration improvements, I’ll always ask about the role of the person who is leading the effort.  Answers range quite a bit.  Sometimes I speak with someone in an IT infrastructure group, sometimes the CIO, sometimes the Enterprise Architect.  Many times the conversation has nothing to do with technology — and I find that I’m speaking to someone in a business unit — responsible for products, or operational efficiency.  Some of the most interesting conversations are with people in the Human Resources groups.  In some ways, HR folks live in a parallel existence with the rest of the company.  They have a wonderful perspective on the challenges that organizations face, while working in parallel with, but not in the organization’s main activity.

I’ve found  the most effective conversations take place when a group representing different interests get together to address the collaboration challenges as a group.  Once this group has formed and worked out their trust issues (see Bruce Tuckman’s team building model, described here too), they become effective at understanding what’s going to work in the context of their company.  The key is that you need to have people at the table who can contribute and address their different areas of concern. You want representation from records management, risk management, HR, IT, operations, architecture, etc.

I came across a blog post on the Saba blog today.  One of the things I liked about the post’s message was the suggestion to “Consider the effect on HR-focused metrics, such as: the percent of performance goals attained, employee retention rates/turnover, increases in employee satisfaction ratings, or an increase in onboarding effectiveness as measured by manager surveys.”  The reason I liked this was that in order to implement this suggestion, you have to work with HR.  This pattern is most successful in organizations where HR functions have authority on the way work gets done.  I’ll note that many HR folks tell me that such organizations are becoming harder to find these days.  

So if you are an HR thought-leader, make sure to get a seat at the table when talking about Enterprise 2.0.  You can help by measuring the effectiveness of the effort.  You have a stake in this.  Moreover, measuring effectiveness gets you close to the social-network data — the data that is critical for human capital management decisions that you need to be involved in.  I’ll talk about this in future posts — but I also hinted to this in a Christian Science Monitor article I contributed to here. 

Whereas tools are an important part of enabling E2.0, the conversation cannot exclusively focus on the tools.  In fact — if all you do in your E2.0 initiative is form a cross-functional group who begin to address some of the barriers and issues that you face — you will have already accomplished a significant milestone in transforming your company’s collaboration.  It’s a great start.  It will cost you some time at meetings.  And it will require awareness of need before this will have effect.   But you won’t even have to buy any tools to gain the benefits from the conversation.  Now that’s old-school collab.

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Tagged as: collaboration, Enterprise 2.0