Since my post regarding the McKinsey study on Tacit Interactions, I've had the chance to chat with alot of people about the subject, including one of the authors Brad Johnson at McKinsey. One of the common themes I am hearing, and that is really starting to resonate clearly with many, is the idea of "efficient" versus "effective" collaboration. The industry tends to focus on the former, and struggle mightily with the later.
Many of the tools we deploy today are focused on efficiency...in fact I'd argue their ROI is almost completely justified on saving travel expenses, lowering phone costs, or reducing some other structural cost (like email storage). While I think it's great (in fact probably a requirement) for us to build in these efficiencies in communication, it shouldn't be, in my opinion, the main focus. Nor do I believe it should be the deciding factor in deploying new collaboration solutions.
The question I ask is: Is it really that valuable to be able to talk to someone quicker, or organize a single team activity around yet another portal, team site or web conference? Yes and No. I believe it depends on how you look at value and how you think about collaboration in your business. If value is simply a reduction in costs or you deploy new tools with little thought to how they're going to be used, then you will find this investment valuable.
However, if what you are trying to do is make your organization more effective, more competitive vis' a vis' your peers, then cost savings is not the driving factor. In fact, it's a 'nice to have' in comparison to the real value an organization receives by facilitating greater team communication, and by allowing those team members to more effectively communicate across multiple projects, functional areas, and locations in real time. I call that difference the effectiveness gap.
The effectiveness gap is measured between individual knowledge sharing in more efficient forms of one-to-one communication, and the organizational knowledge built on more implicit interactions (effective communicating) across a larger group of professionals, both inside and outside your organization. The gap in my view is a large chasm. Those who bridge this chasm with the right collaboration tools will undoubtedly create sustainable advantages based on their unique contributors (individual professionals) coming together to exchange important ideas or information in groups, faster than the competition, and broadening that awareness throughout the organization at the same time.
I'm encouraged by the conversations I am having with various parties. I believe that organizations are finally beginning to look at collaboration with an eye toward effectiveness, asking themselves "How can I capture and use the resources (teams of people) we have?" These same firms are less so concerned with the efficiency of individual correspondence. E-mail and IM accomplish much of this, and have for years. These organizations are looking beyond those legacy solutions and determining how they can persistently engage teams (no matter how many times the members change) focused on solving the same problem, and allow them to be involved in more than a single "discussion" at the same time (after all we are all involved in more then one project or discussion at a time).
Effectiveness to them means solving more problems quicker, executing new strategies with greater insight and influence over time, exponentially increasing the awareness of these decisions/actions/discussions/information, and truly leveraging the unique knowledge of their organizations in ways that their competition cannot. While I'm not aware of a particular ROI model that captures these benefits in the traditional sense, I am fairly confident that there is no collaboration solution on the market that will cost even a fraction of the gains seen by any one or all of the benefits accruing to your business.
