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Technologies of
Trust
With over 1,000 vendors on the “collaboration” bandwagon, it is difficult to know which technologies would be right for you and your organization. For instance: which vendors actually support collaborative functionality (rather than just hype), and what strategies they have to aid you in the adoption of these applications across your enterprise or value network. The goal of this part of the chapter is to look at some of the key factors for selecting and implementing collaboration technologies successfully in the enterprise. However we will revisit this theme in more detail in Chapter 15.
Remember the old advertising slogan, “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!” It could just as well apply to the predicament of many collaboration vendors today. They have had great success in pilot projects, but cannot seem to get greater penetration of their technology or higher adoption rates in the enterprise, no matter how many new features they add.
Many of these vendors are slowly coming to realize that collaboration success is not really about features and functions, but rather about how well the technology integrates with and supports processes critical to the organization, and how the organization manages its own systemic change process. Yet many of these same vendors are unprepared to tackle this problem within their own professional service organizations. The best way to counteract these drawbacks is a holistic approach to collaboration.
When speaking about a holistic approach, there are three critical factors for success in collaboration (in order of importance):
- People
(behaviors, attitudes, culture)
- Process
(critical business processes with collaborative leverage)
- Technology
(offers good user experience, integrated and connected to many data
sources)
Figure 1: People, Process and Technology are Essential for Successful Virtual Teams
For any type of collaborative behavior to occur, there must be some level of trust in place, either for the ongoing sharing of complex information, or the coordination of tasks over time. Yet collaboration technologies do not inherently engender the attitude or belief of trust. The critical role of technology is to support the interactions between people so that they can establish trust, which will then allow them to share and coordinate their work.
The key word here is people. When talking about the ongoing social interactions of two or more people, we are talking about relationships and we all know how challenging those can be.
A few years ago I (Stewart) was presenting at a conference of CIO’s of
Major Law Firms and Law Departments. I was heartened and gratified
to hear almost every presenter (tech types all) admit that it did not matter
how good the technology was – if people could not communicate well
the best technology was not going to save them. I realized then that every
technological implementation needed both a communication / trust / relationship
building component and a change management element if the implementation
was going to be successful.
The Pareto Principle--also known as the 80-20 Rule--states that, for many events, 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. This would suggest that 80% (or more) of the effort in collaboration has gone into the development of these enabling technologies; 20% (or less) has been focused on the relationships or interactions between people. Why? Because the software tools are tangible, and are what both vendors and CIOs are most familiar with and, in reality, are much easier to deal with than relationships. Software code is much easier to change than people’s behavior.
Relationships, trust, behavior, and attitude are all “the soft stuff” and are not within the mindset of most software vendors and CIOs. If the collaboration strategy in the enterprise is left up to technology people, then technology is what you get. Often these “solutions” don’t solve the real problem, and as a result they are often left unused or abandoned by the business units for which they were developed or purchased. They often reflect IT goals but don’t really reflect critical processes or the culture of the team, department or organization. So if the technology people are not dealing with this “soft stuff” whose responsibility is it?
To answer this question, let’s address the notion of collaborative pain and the real cost associated with ineffective collaboration. Collaborative pain occurs when the lack of information sharing or coordination in a critical process slows down the cycle time sufficiently to create a serious problem for the process or project owner.
It is easy to see then how the process or project owner, in effect, has responsibility for the “soft stuff” of collaboration. Whoever has profit and loss responsibility–for the project, process, department, or coalition of which the process is a part–has this responsibility. This individual would be wise to take a holistic view of collaboration as success depends on their ability to address people, process and technology issues simultaneously with the heaviest focus on people.
Collaboration is, we believe, primarily about people, about trust and about the willingness to share information and work in a coordinated manner to achieve a common goal. This premise, which is the focus of Part II of this book, will establish how interpersonal skills are needed to effectively use many of the collaboration technologies we describe here in Part I.
