The Right Way To Get Employees To Collaborate

A lot of my work in recent years has been with companies that have approached SharePoint the wrong way. You know the drill: The boys and girls in IT get shiny new toys from Microsoft, learn how to play with them, and then tell the rest of the business to "go for it" and "have at it." The net result is that not much actually happens, apart from further undermining the relationship between IT and the business groups.

In a recent engagement, I was working with an organization that had taken the exact same approach, but with Lotus Connections rather than SharePoint. No involvement from the business groups. No engagement to learn how the business groups actually worked and got stuff done. Little consideration paid to the positioning of the new collaboration tools in Connections with relation to the other tools offered by IT and used on a day-to-day basis. The technology was different than SharePoint, but the process was the same, and thus just as wrong. The all-too-common outcome with "SharePoint projects gone wrong" was happening again with Connections.

What do you do when the very technology that's supposed to encourage collaboration ends up creating strife and undermining collaboration? Whenever I find an organization at this place, I have three specific recommendations: