Increasingly, content – whether a book, database, report, or the amassed knowledge of an organization – is the result of teamwork. A team could be a few people in scattered offices working on a common project; or a network of editors, designers, and authors producing publications.
One challenging aspect of teamwork is managing the results of individual and collective efforts – that is, keeping the team’s ideas, discussions, and documents available and organized. When the product of teamwork resides mainly in e-mail, notes, and incomplete or conflicting memories of conversations, the value of that team’s work diminishes. Plus, where effective collaboration systems are absent, team members often end up doing more work than they need to – retracing each other’s steps or reinventing the wheel in one way or another.
Then there’s this nasty complication: Companies often implement costly and complex systems to manage content (CMS) or knowledge (KM) before mastering the art and tools of effective team collaboration. Consequently, the quality of the content being managed suffers, or the systems get bypassed or abandoned.
What a waste – and how discouraging to everyone involved!
In the latest issue of CMSwatch, consultant Matthew Clapp tackles this common misunderstanding head on. Check out Collaboration First, Then Knowledge Management. This article should be considered essential reading for any project or content-creation team, as well as to IT staff and other departments charged with supplying tools to manage information.
Here are some of my favorite excerpts…
- “There are two major goals of any collaboration initiative:
- Enable your employees around the world to easily collaborate; and
- Be able to share that output with the rest of the organization.
“…Too many collaboration technology implementations are led by a knowledge management team that may have reversed the order of those two priorities. This can contribute to an over-engineered, failed project because the process for contributing and classifying content is so cumbersome that workers bypass the million dollar solution for another, simpler one that works.”
- “Before you go and blow your entire budget on a solution that has the same likelihood of success as a manned mission to Mars in the same timeframe, consider piloting an open source solution with a small group that is in dire need and eager to get started. This will allow you time to build your business case, learn some hard lessons about usability, and also make essential improvements to business processes in anticipation of other groups. You will also quickly discover the sources of any network connectivity problems and have an opportunity to solve other persnickety (but potentially prohibitive) technical problems before rolling out a full-blown solution globally. A small sample of open source groupware tools available are: dotProject, eGroupWare, Moregroupware, phpCollab, and PHProjekt.”
- “Departments may have access to the enterprise collaboration tool (sometimes a warmed-over DM system), but the process to insert a document to the repository is ridiculously daunting. This problem often comes in the form of onerous metadata requirements, which are useful for the enterprise and zealously promoted by some knowledge management gurus, but a big hassle for collaborative workgroups looking to complete a simple project. Tagging documents and storing them properly in a proprietary repository can be so time consuming that employees will just bypass the collaboration tools and go for what works. I’ve seen people collaborate via Yahoo! groups because of the time it takes to contribute a single document to the authorized collaborative space. Others get even cleverer and utilize another corporate tool, Microsoft NetMeeting, sending each other files via NetMeeting to bypass the low megabyte levels on their corporate email systems.”
Seriously – be practical and flexible when it comes to collaboration tools. Do experiment with simple, inexpensive, open-source options first. Start small, and see how team members really put those systems to use. Customize your tools as needed. Balance creativity with strategic goals.
Keep in mind that if you want a collaboration/content management system that truly aids your efforts, you can’t simply install it – you must grow it, without letting it sprawl like a weed. Then it will bear fruit.
