Glad you liked the post.

Understanding your company’s DNA is important when it comes to determining how best to collaborate – whether that’s Skype, some other tool or face to face. It’s also important to understand how each person likes to communicate or collaborate individually.

Some people stay on top of their email inbox and that’s the best way to get a message to them. Others have an inbox with thousands of unanswered messages and would rather talk over the phone. And still some prefer IM or wiki or microblogging, etc…

To be an effective communicator you not only have to have the right message but you have to understand the best medium to get that message out.

That really is a great example. Taking your thinking out if the protected space into a dynamic and constantly moving environment. I’ll have to keep that in mind for future brainstorms.

At the company I work at we use Skype….too much. I noticed that for the smallest thing we would use Skype, even when they were 5 steps away. A new colleague joined us who was adamant to walk over with all her questions. This face to face contact was so strangely refreshing, that now I walk over for as much as possible.

I guess the way an organization collaborates is key to it’s character and DNA. I know that all my face to face collaborations have been much quicker, and more insightful than over Skype.

Great post David.

Thanks for your response. I love your whiteboard example! Personally I think office walls should be whiteboards so that innovation and collaboration can happen anywhere, all the time. (There’s actually a paint called IdeaPaint that turns walls into whiteboards. I have it in my home office)

Thanks,

Rob

I think what we’d really like to see, regardless of whether or not there is a tool involved, is more communication and collaboration in general. From that standpoint, it’s more a matter of building the case that communication and collaboration actually produce better business decisions. And then, if appropriate for your team/organization/company, is there a tool that can enable better/faster/cheaper communication and collaboration.

Last night at the office we had a perfect example of how collaboration greatly improved a process redesign we were working on. (not to give too much away, b/c I’m working it in to another blog post) The gist of it was that when a colleague and I were forced to take our whiteboard out of a conference room (silo) and into a heavy traffic hallway (dynamic signal) we immediately had additional colleagues taking notice of what we were doing, stopping in the hall and adding their thoughts and experiences to what we were working on. We ended up with a much more robust (and I would say ‘better’) result than if we had stayed in the conference room and not shown our work to anyone.

We need more examples like this to show the value of collaboration. Once the case is made we can use tools to scale from hallways to international organizations.

To your second point of ownership, I agree with your distributed approach. I think each of the organizations you mention are going to play a role, some roles will be purely tactical (say tool maintenance and hosting), some will be more strategic and drive business requirements. It’s going to be different at each organization, but I believe business requirements should lead the way. Identify business problems, prioritize them and let them guide you.

http://orgnet.com/email.gif

Can you spot the communication problems???

Valdis

However, this point and those made in your piece are not easy to drive home. As an internal communications professional, who in the past has also worked in marketing, knowledge management, and even IT, I’ve been fortunate to have the perspective that makes this linkage very clear to me. It’s something I’ve tried to preach in the organizations I’ve worked with and have at times informally served as that “bridge”. But successfully and consistently “enabling the application of knowledge to data and information” through effective communications still escapes most organizations.

Internal social media offers the opportunity to change that as long as leadership can be made to see beyond social media’s obvious tie to marketing. That’s why I like the Dachis concept of “Social Business”. Extensive communication and collaboration through the right tools (not necessarily new tools, just the right ones that fit the culture) must be pervasive in any company hoping to succeed in businesses that rely on knowledge workers. Use of social technologies, including both communication and collaboration tools, must be built into a firm’s strategy.

Successful development and implementation of such strategy requires the skills of both communications and knowledge management professionals, which leads to another organization problem these days (and the potential topic for another piece) — who leads social media/technologies? Should it be communications, marketing, IT, knowledge services (if the company has such a group)? This can sometimes be a contentious issue that can make matters worse. My two cents is that no group should really lead it. It should be championed by leadership and be pervasive throughout all groups, divisions, etc. In reality though, especially in this early stage of social business enterprise adoption, some group will lead it and the danger is that they may not understand this very important connection between communication and knowledge.