1. Culture clashes.

Despite the productivity benefits of presence-aware tools, enterprises must grapple with the cultural shift toward real-time collaboration. While organizations typically make use of the tools optional, many employees feel compelled to join in if they want to participate in key decisions.

"There's a lot of people who find it to be an intrusion and invasion of privacy, because they walk away from their desk for five minutes and their machine declares that they're idle or they're reading a document on paper at their desk, and all of a sudden their computer claims that they're idle," says Kevin Angley of SAS.

At Procter & Gamble, the company emphasizes to its employees that 24-hour availability is unnecessary. "It comes up culturally all of the time. When do I get to quit working? That is just a reality as our business and personal lives converge," says Laurie Heltsley of Procter & Gamble. Heltsley explains that it's acceptable for P&G people to turn their presence status to off or unavailable.

2. Ownership issues.

In some enterprises, corporate communications or even human resources manages videoconferencing, Web conferencing and collaboration. Collaboration tools are sometimes an outgrowth of distance learning and training, and HR has historically driven those initiatives. In other cases, corporate communications has run video production and business television, and videoconferencing may have grown out of these efforts.

"Ownership" also may depend on the network. The more advanced the network, the more viable it is for rich, real-time collaboration and the more likely that IT will manage those tools.

Regardless of which function drives collaboration, ideally, multiple functions partner in developing a collaboration strategy and implementing tools. Collaboration accomplishes business objectives more effectively when organizations focus on integrating tools into work styles and culture.