What Collaboration Can And Can't Fix

Connecting Colleagues And Information Across Boundaries

Employees are the most valuable asset that any organization possesses, and right now those employees don't have the ability to stay connected with their peers and with information they need to get their work done. Most employees work in silos and never communicate or collaborate with people outside of their department. We also see employees having to email files to themselves just to make sure that they can keep working on them when they get home or switch locations. Employees today are only partially connected to information and their peers. It's sort of like having horrible Wi-Fi service that allows you to get bits and pieces of information--not effective and very annoying.

Other Common Collaboration Problems

-- Stagnant innovation.

-- Poor employee engagement.

-- Inability to effectively share and transfer knowledge. When employees retire or quit, they take their information with them right out of the company.

-- Difficulty aligning departments and the organization as a whole.

-- Inability to leverage collective intelligence to make decisions.

-- Poor overall employee productivity.

There are many other issues that organizations are faced with, but these seem to be the most common and frequent.

Once you understand what your business problems are, you can derive the use cases for collaboration and the features you need a collaboration platform to have. This will also help you understand how you should be measuring and evaluating success. Often organizations deploy solutions without really understanding why. As a result, they are unable to tell how effective their efforts are.

You'd look pretty silly walking around your house with a hammer, searching for things to bash in. You'd look just as silly deploying a tool and then trying to a find a problem for it to solve.

[ Make room for innovation: What's Your Unadoption Strategy For Enterprise 2.0? ]

Social media make the customer more powerful than ever. Here's how to listen and react. Also in the new, all-digital The Customer Really Comes First issue of The BrainYard: The right tools can help smooth over the rough edges in your social business architecture. (Free registration required.)