Collaboration ...

I had posted yesterday about the main aspects of change that a web 2.0 consultant, to my mind, should focus on. In a comment on this, Aparna had pointed me to an interesting article about Collaborating for Results. The point made here is worth looking at ... That managers believe that they can do no wrong with any form of collaboration, and that there is such a thing as over-collaboration. One aspect of this probably is that while there is the obvious noise which comes from too much of collaboration (ok, i am using the term loosely), having said that, there is also the fact that too much is probably better than too little.

Another aspect which is discussed here is that:

Identify the barriers to collaboration; and third, tailor the management interventions to those barriers after diagnosing what they are in the first place.

This is an important point. What i had written earlier was that there are certain inflexion points where maximum value can be generated by adoption of web 2.0 tools, and these points of the organization should probably be leveraged in any implementation. For example, a team which is geographically dispersed, with diverse skill sets and large knowledge base may benefit more from web 2.0 tools than a team which has all the people sitting in a single room, with more or less similar skill sets. Though such examples of diverse teams are difficult to come by in an organization, but this does illustrate the point.

However, the aspect which this point brings up is that in an organization there are going to be barriers to collaboration. These could arise from the nature of work, the compensation structure, the culture, or so many other aspects. Having said that, the important aspect is to determine these, and to work towards reducing these barriers, so as to build smoother collaboration channels, and this, probably is one of the important aspects for any Web 2.0 consultant.

Thank you Aparna.

Any thoughts, please feel free to comment.