Defining Collaboration

One of my favorite blogs is “The Big Shift” over at Harvard Business Publishing, a blog about innovation, collaboration, and other trends in business.  In a recent post, they lamented that “Popular as the word is, collaboration mostly goes undefined.”  They go on:

Many people, we suspect, would define collaboration as any situation where people work together in a coordinated way to achieve common objectives and would include highly specified and synchronized coordination, such as traditional assembly line operations.

I would take this statement a step further, in that many people (and organizations) would define collaboration more broadly than this even to include things like “coordination” and “information sharing”, both activities that I (and I suspect the authors of the Big Shift) would argue are not really collaboration.  And while this may seem like a semantic arguments, the Economist Intelligence Unit stated: “The labels themselves are not important, but labelling every initiative as “collaboration” creates a misnomer that robs [organizations] of the ability to deploy resources efficiently and effectively to create the most value.”

Things That Definitely Aren’t Collaboration

A word on two activities (there are many more) that are grouped with collaboration, but are entirely different activities.  These two are coordination and information sharing.

Coordination generally involves sharing an already-written draft document, report, policy, or proposal with stakeholders inside and outside the initiating organization.  While it sounds good, this is more of a C.Y.A. activity than anything meant to produce value: get other pieces of the organization to check off some boxes, hopefully while not changing products too much.  Coordination, in my opinion, is usually a value-subtracting activity.

Information Sharing is another activity that is sometimes called collaboration, but to me is just a piece of the collaboration process.  In the words of 9/11 Commission members LTG Peter Kind (United States Army, Ret retired) and Katharine J. Burton, “Access to information does not necessarily lead to effective knowledge sharing and collaboration.  When people share knowledge, they are not just sharing information; they are also sharing cultural and social references.” Access to similar information is an important piece of collaborative knowledge creation process; however, it should not be confused with collaboration.

My Definition of Collaboration

Having said this, much like the Big Shift, I have now posted more than 30 posts to this blog without ever really having defined collaboration.  My definition  of collaboration is the following (drawn mostly out of my client service experience):

Collaboration is the interaction of and among employees and their partners—exploiting their diverse expertise and organizational resources to more effectively create superior value and/or deliver more efficient services than an organization or individual could have accomplished alone.

I believe that this definition highlights that the value proposition of collaboration for organizations, as “higher value” (in terms of service delivery) is ultimately the driving force behind the focus on collaboration in organizations  Additionally, this definition deliberately characterizes collaboration as a means to achieving an organization’s goals: collaboration is not an end itself.

Facebook for the Enterprise

There’s been a lot of hype around social networking and social network analysis as of late.  Time magazine called “Facebook for Spies” (and again yesterday) one of it’s top 50 inventions for 2008.  A number of other organizations are focused on deploying internal social networking solutions, so that their employees can better keep up with their colleagues.  But the question that sometimes remains in the ether is why are companies doing this? As an aside, I sometimes wonder whether organizations understand why they are deploying social networking services, but that’s another issue.

What’s the Point?

To me, the reason for deploying social networking services is clear: Work is really not that different from “real life”.  Think about this (preferably with an open mind): Why do you use Facebook? I can’t speak for anybody else, but it’s a number of things for me:

• It’s a big address book with almost all of my friends in it
• It’s a great way to contact friends
• It lets me figure out what friends are doing with relatively minimal effort

I think these three reasons are the primary reasons that most people use Facebook, whether they realize it or not.  Now swap out the word “friends” for “colleagues”, and you have your reasons for corporate social networking services.

It’s about People

Social networking services, at least the good ones, are brilliant because they allow people to connect to people.  That’s one of the core principles for my job (the other two being connecting people to data and data to data), and ultimately, that’s the part of collaboration that most technical solutions miss: it’s telling that a Gartner conference on collaboration that I attended last year had the word “Portals” in it.  To me, there’s nothing less collaborative than a portal because it completely ignores the “people” aspect of collaboration.  Really? A common website makes a community of interest? Everyone uses Google as a portal to the web, but nobody surmises that all Internet users are really a community of interest.

The beauty of Facebook is that it is a technology that is completely built to facilitate interactions between people.  There’s not a whole lot more to it than that, at least to me.  Collaboration is about people.  It requires that you connect people, that people communicate, and that you can rally the necessary people behind a problem when the metaphorical balloon goes up.