Excerpt from Essential SharePoint® 2007: Delivering High-Impact Collaboration.
By Scott Jamison, Mauro Cardarelli, and Susan Hanley Published by Addison Wesley Professional ISBN-10: 0-321-42174-4 ISBN-13: 978-0-321-42174-6

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Collaboration literally means "to labor together." From a business perspective, it is the nirvana of organizations aspiring to optimize efficiency and increase returns. Why? Highly collaborative companies maximize their use of corporate data and enable all knowledge workers to be consumers and producers of content. This is in contrast to the characteristics of a non-collaborative environment, where users store information on their local hard drives and rarely share information. There are also semi-collaborative organizations, where users sometimes put documents on network folders and might send emails with attachments. In a highly collaborative organization, there are many efficient ways to share and find information such as portals, team sites, blogs, and wikis.

A high-impact collaboration environment allows all levels of an organization to execute faster, more consistently, and more productively. The typical organization uses shared network drives and emails. Both are ineffective in their ability to truly capture the history and full context of the end document. A network folder might contain a client document, but it is very hard to associate any of the authoring interactions that may have occurred during its creation. Emails can capture person-to-person discussions but are linear and cannot be easily aggregated.

Portals are a great facilitator of collaboration because they provide the forums and tools for individuals, independent of location, to come together virtually to access and alter a single source of content. Collaboration is not simply content creation but also the means of getting there—the process that people use to work together. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 introduces a number of new tools to take organizational collaboration to a new level. The tools themselves are not new in concept, but the notion of introducing them and connecting them within corporate firewalls can have a dramatic impact. Moreover, the fact that the tools are so easy to use, combined with the integration with the way people already work, is downright revolutionary. They offer a new paradigm of unstructured knowledge capture. By making it very easy to capture an expert's thoughts electronically, information that typically goes undocumented or stays in an expert's head will likely get shared more often, benefiting entire teams if not entire organizations.

Team sites, blogs, and wikis all offer different means of allowing individuals or teams to store, share, and alter structured content (for example, documents) and unstructured content (commentary) in a single environment. It also enables organizations to quickly share information across organizations—for example, a regular communication with suppliers, partners, or customers. The return on investment associated with collaboration initiatives is typically measured with two main metrics:

• The ability to effectively store information that was not being documented

• The ability to retrieve and reuse that information to accelerate a highly repeatable business process

Collaboration is less a science and more a philosophy. In the business world, it is the belief that providing tools for knowledge sharing offers competitive and measurable benefits.

Getting Started with Collaboration

Why is collaboration difficult? If the results are so compelling, why do so few organizations have good collaboration strategies? The answer is a combination of technology and methodology. Knowledge workers, the individuals within an organization who interact with and execute business processes, need the right tools to allow them to document information that is potentially useful to peers. In that same sense, organizations need to ease rules around content approval in order for this information to flow freely into the knowledge system. It's actually harder than that. Even with the right tools and permissions, these knowledge workers need guidance on what information is truly useful and where it should go. Additionally, beyond the technology and processes that foster good collaboration, incentive structures need to be in place to encourage knowledge workers to take that extra step to contribute and categorize content for later reuse.

Challenges of Knowledge Placement

The challenge of knowledge placement is significant because most employees have multiple roles around corporate content. An individual can be an employee of the organization, a member of a department, an expert in a practice area, or a contributor on multiple project teams. Each role is associated with different corporate data and business processes. How does one know when to share?

One approach is to segment the multiple levels of corporate information into three main categories:

• Organization. This is highest level and represents the collection of all employees. From a content perspective, information at this level pertains to all or most users. It may contain corporate news and announcements, mission statements, human resources and benefits information, and any broadcast information.

• Communities. Communities are collections of individuals with similar interests, expertise, or business roles. They can be departments or practice areas. From a content perspective, information at this level is mostly interesting to members. It may contain templates, best practices, white papers, and training materials.

• Virtual teams. Virtual teams are small groups of employees who come together for some fixed amount of time to complete an objective. The "virtual" part of this is a new concept to many people. Teams are becoming less fixed and are forming instead to accomplish a set of tasks and then dispersing again.

  A team could consist of project members or product teams. From a content perspective, information at this level is very interesting to members and potentially interesting to members of other virtual teams looking to complete a similar objective. It might contain document deliverables, discussion threads, and meeting notes.

Think of your collaborative organization as a hierarchy with users playing a potential role at each level (see Figure 8.1). An individual can have responsibilities at one or more levels. His or her knowledge contribution is based on the role that the user plays within a given virtual team or leadership position. For example, an analyst might be very active in contributing documents and commentary at a project level but has no need to contribute at the organizational level. An executive might not be on any project's team but needs to understand what the team is doing and offer strategic guidance and vision at the organizational level. One of the biggest challenges around any portal and collaboration strategy is how to take the best work products from virtual teams and communities and expose them to the wider organization once those teams and/or communities have disbanded.

Figure 8.1
A user can play roles at one or more levels of collaborative responsibility within an organization.