"Until we show our people how collaboration and productivity tools can close more sales or help us meet more deadlines or build better products, they'll pay only lip service to this stuff." says Rob Preston, VP/Editor In Chief at InformationWeek.

Sounds simple, right? Consider the difficulties in calculating investment alone, which may include purchase price or licensing fees, installation and customization, and ongoing adminstration. So far, so good! You've deployed your collaboration tool... yet no one is using it. People don't want to make the effort to learn or use the new tools. Research shows that to get real value out of collaboration tools, you have to change your processes, and that takes additional investment. If you expect your users to adopt new processes, you'll also need to identify which processes they will drop, and overcome the natural human resistance to change.

Whether you use process reengineering or internal marketing to institute top-down process changes, or engage grass roots communities to accelerate bottom-up adoption, or some combination of both, you'll need to invest resources to succeed in technology adoption. Rebecca Wettermann, VP of research at Nucleus Research, considers the human aspects of technology adoption in another InformationWeek article.

So what happens when people attempt to follow Rob Preston's advice? Two possiblities are likely.

First, the "secret success-or-failure scenario" takes hold, and the results don't become public at all. It works this way: if the project is a success, they want to keep this valuable competitive knowledge a secret. If it's a failure, they want to keep this damaging competitive knowledge a secret.

On the other hand, if they do release the results of their fair analysis for a given situation, it doesn't translate to other environments. Arm-chair skeptics have a heyday and doubt is cast on the analysis itself and the company as a side affect.

If you were involved in a successful collaboration project, would you take Rob's advice? Does this mean collaboration requires a leap of faith?

4:13:51 PM    
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