Collaboration is the magic buzz word of the decade.  For those who have read my other articles,you should have a good understanding of some of the tools we can use, but Collaboration is not about the individual tools, it’s about the communications blueprint.  It’s not about the hammer, it is about the house.

Normally, this is the prevue of the CIO, and this is what they get paid to do.  However, the majority of the time the CIO is more the CSO (Chief Systems Officer) than they are the Chief Information Officer.  They normally focus on the systems that information is stored on, and how it gets there and how it gets retrieved.  In most cases, however, that data is only valuable if used by the right people and communicated to the correct teams.  Normal processes stop short building in the communications aspect of data delivery.  So let’s change the way we think about this process all together.

What we need is a Collaboration strategy.  In a similar way that every business is now building BCPs (Business Continuity Plans) and DRPs (Disaster Recovery Plans) I believe they should be building Collaboration Plans.  The Collaboration Plan should tie into every system, should identify process enhancement, business survivability, and data redundancy.  The two things that most companies cannot survive without are voice communications and email.  If done correctly these are key components of a Collaboration Strategy.  To build a Collaboration strategy we need to follow a few simple rules.

Rule #1:  Spend time with every business unit and department in your organization, and find out how they communicate.  I did this in one of my customers who recently spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on new state of the art IP Handsets.  After I spent some time reviewing their existing processes I realized the 47% of their staff never touched a handset.  Of that 47%half of them were sales people who lived on their mobile phones.  The other half communicated on a variety of non-sanctioned instant messaging clients. So why did they buy all of those phones? They were replacements for the previous system.  No one took the time to build a plan, they just replaced the tool…

Rule #2:  Determine what tools you have already purchased, THROUGHOUT the organization.  In one of my federal clients we found over 150 different management tools with each having a 70% overlap in some fashion with at least 10 other products.  There was not consolidated review before tools were purchased and with each change in personnel there was a change in preference with no guiding strategic document to control the tactical purchases.

Rule #3:  Identify what additional technology you need to reduce the mean “time to decision” in each process identified in Rule #1 without changing the process and disrupting the end user culture.  Take into account the findings in Rule #2 and identify what can be re-used and what needs to be scrapped.

Rule #4: Build a plan that spans 18-36 months with pre-planned technical reviews every 6-12-18 month markers.  The largest cost to most Voice over IP phone systems today is the handsets.  Two years ago vendors released tools like Mobile Communicators which ran on Mobile smartphones that supported 802.11 Wireless. You could actually have your office phone on your cell phone, which would alleviate the need for companies where 47% of the people only use their smartphones anyway.  The problem was that two years ago few mobile phones had 802.11 built in, and the applications drained the batteries so fast the application was not practical.  However, 24 months later…we have the iPhone,the Android, and dozens of phones that can connect to wireless networks and the batteries have been optimized for application use.  We can build better plans for growth and save our customers much needed money.

Using these four rules, I have a 3 step process.  First conduct a business review, Rule#1.  Second, conduct a technical review,Rules 2 and 3.  Finally, build your plan Rule #4.  Of course, the devil is always in the details, and I know this is a very generic overview.  I hope it will help you find a starting point and to understand that while sometimes the planning phase may seem like it will cost more than it is worth, it can provide you with long term savings.  It can increase your productivity and it can increase your profits. 

I recommend that you engage a paid consultant either from your integrator or use a third party.  As a part of the integrator community, I can say with certainty that you will get what you pay for.  If someone offers you free consulting to get your business, what you will get in return is a report from an automated tool that will attempt to justify your purchase of some individual tool or system.  If you pay them to spend time with your people and ask them to be your honest broker then you will normally get the best person they have, because this is where their reputation is made or broken.  Not in the free pre-sales effort.

Information overload causes even the best leaders to quickly become overwhelmed with today’s plethora of information resources.  Social Networking is the new buzz for enterprise networking because it has inadvertently created a way to consolidate those various sources of information into useful communities. Controlling the flow of the information torrent coming at Enterprises is such a critical marketspace that Cisco, Google, Microsoft, and IBM are spending millions to exploit it. 

Let me share with you a standard set of tools currently being used for corporate messaging (read marketing) and how you can configure them to channel the information you consume into a set of relevant views for yourself and others.

Let’s start with the basics: corporate web sites, blogs, twitter, facebook, and linked-in. These are the common tools of the web marketing trade.

Companies have spent millions of dollars building web sites that portray a corporate image for the masses.  Spending millions in advertising, press releases and product announcements to drive people to those sites, web sites still tend to be static, like electronic catalogues and store fronts.  Web sites are the destination that you, as a consumer, are being driven to.

Blogs, anyone who watches television has heard the term blog, but most consumers still do not know what it is or if they do, they are not comfortable with the concept of sharing their private lives publicly.  Blogs are electronic diaries that popped up when technical exhibitionists found a way to share their lives with the world.  The corporate world latched on to the concept of sharing information more dynamically without having to re-develop their expensive web sites. Businesses started to use them to have dynamic conversations with their consumers, market analysts and the public at large.  The comments shared with the company could then be published with the original content and create a conversation.  However, the consumer either had to be driven to the corporate blog or had to search it out.

Micro-blogs, like twitter, take the concept of a blog to a whole new level.  They are a public record of thoughts expressed in only 140 characters or less.  Millions of people now had a voice to participate dynamically in individual thoughts shared by everyone, celebrities, politicians, CEOs, musicians, and common everyday people.  Communities formed to have electronic conversations.  Simply by searching key words you could find people, companies, anyone who had posted a thought.  Then you could follow them, keeping track of the conversations or the individuals.

Facebook and Linked-in gave protected forums to people to connect and share with people they already knew or had professional relationships with.  They combined blogging with micro-blogging, organized communities with ad-hoc communities,and social applications that could be used by all.

The population of these social communities is in the range of 100’s of millions of participants. That means the conversation threads are in the billions if not trillions.  That information can be harnessed and provide you with a competitive informational advantage in understanding market trends, reaching consumers and building a corporate image.

I will not go into the entire eco-system in this article but let present this example to tie the components together.

                  My small consulting company has a web site and a blog. (I did not spend millions on either).  I have facebook and linked-in accounts for myself where I am a member of several communities.  I also have a twitter account for myself @stephensdd and for the company @collaborate_kde.  My goal is to drive people to web site where the will learn that we do VoIP training, technical and business consulting. In order to provide value I post articles to the blog and to e-zines.  Up to this point I’ve relied on search engine optimization to get “found”.  Recently I began to use twitterfeed.com to automatically post to the company twitter account every time I create a blog entry.  Each post makes me a part of the searchable conversation, and I draw in followers who then monitor my tweets,then blogs, then the web site. 

            This is not news for those already familiar with twitter, but twitter added something this week that is extremely useful.  Twitter lists. Until this week if I wanted to follow IT analysts for industry trending I had to follow each one individually combing work and personal tweets on the same page causing that dreaded information overload and providing little value.  Now I can create a Twitter list and call it any thing I want, like collaborate_kde/Collaboration_Experts.  I can then add, @CiscoCollab,@Tandberg, @MicrosoftSharepoint (these are made up) and@UCStrategies to alist.  When I want to follow theconversation for that list I simply click on it and I can see the industry conversation trending, product announcements, legal announcements and the like in one view.  That view is separate from my personal tweets and from other industries I may be tracking.

            Two final thoughts on Twitter lists, first they are public and anyone who finds your list on a key word search can follow your list and second you can follow your own company account in the same list.  If I desire to elevate my corporate image to my consumers to demonstrate my industry expertise, than what better way to have my tweets in the same list as the tweets from the giants in my industry.  Since I own the list I am the only one who can modify which accounts it will follow.

            I can now have my other social sites like facebook and linked-in follow my tweets and automatically re-post the same information with one simple entry into the blog. 

Now my 300 + Facebook friends and my 400 plus contacts on linked-in will be notified that I am actively writing articles like this to help you all achieve success in communication!  Good luck and happy tweeting, as always feel free to chime in and make this blog more dynamic.