Michael Specht

In the comments of my last post Regina Miller points to her posts at Corante’s Future Tense on creating a culture for collaboration where she extends some of the ideas and thoughts from Nancy White on collaboration with Web 2.0 tools. Nancy tries to dispel the myth of “effortless collaboration”, which is what the marketing hype will be selling and provides some great insight into why there is no such thing. Regina also points to Steve Coats on the softer side of collaboration which adds further depth to the discussion.

Fundamentally it all comes down to corporate culture. Some companies just do not generate a culture of collaboration and I would also suspect that they also have a larger grey zone. Culture influences so many aspects that it should never be ignored or even underestimated.

One final thought IT should never drive broad workplace technology projects. However they tend to end up at the helm because no other department stands up. In my personal view a technology project should be driven by the function who services end customer and owns the end result. Where employees are concerned, this is HR. If you are an HR director where are you? Marketing would never let IT drive a CRM project, Finance a new finance system the same should be for employee tools. Period.

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