Collaboration Centricity

There are two critical questions one should ask when considering collaboration initiatives. Firstly, why do you wish to collaborate? We generally either collaborate to distribute a message or to co-create something. The rise of web 2.0 has now introduced a second question, how do you wish to collaborate? Do we collaborate in a process centric way – where we know the process, know our stakeholders and therefore a collaboration solution facilitates this known process? Or, on the contrary, do we collaborate in information centric way, we want collaborative input but we do not necessarily know from whom and there is possibly no formal process that will ensure people collaborate? Here we are in wiki world, newsgroup world or even community of practice world. We are “crowdsourcing” and in order to achieve our aim we rely asynchronously on others being motivated to contribute.

So why the distinction? Well clearly a process centric and information centric solutions are different. With one the process is well known and can be optimised through workflow with the other we rely on the “crowd” finding what we are collaborating on and being interested sufficiently to input into the process. It can both altruistic, motivating others for their input, or indeed covert allowing issues and input to be given voluntarily. The challenge is how can organisations tap into the innovation, knowledge and creativity of the “crowd”. Soon we will be releasing more research here but for the moment, please remember the two questions before designing collaboration solutions, why do you wish to collaborate and secondly and as importantly how do you wish to collaborate?