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Online collaboration

Internet collaboration is having a large impact on the world wide web.

Collaboration online

The internet and Collaboration go together like strawberries and cream. One without the other is unlikely to show their true potential. Collaboration works when people can work and communicate together seamlessly. It is the making it seamless that empowers the group. Such groups of collaborative people working together often produces results greater than their individual sum. That is we appear to get more out than we have put in. Often diversity in the group of collaborators acts as the amplifier for this Gain in result. If group members are too similar the magic collaborative benefits don't emerge.

Internet collaboration tools enables remote workers and groups of workers to work together seamlessly. We know this works well we can see the results from successful open source projects, look at Linux, Firefox and MySQL, hugely successful collaborative projects with many contributors. The question is can we apply these tools to business ? Do we need to change them ? What works and what doesn't work.

The answers seem to indicate many of the popular collaboration tools can be used with only minor changes. For example A wiki is an extremely useful and some what simple collaboration tool. Unfortunately many corporate users would experience a culture shock learning wikiwords. With this in mind We can up with a wiki that uses and GUI that corporate users are more familiar with. This interface makes the wiki operation much more acceptable in a business environment. And if anyone isn't convinced of the wiki's power just take a look at wikipedia.

Blogging is another example which fits into business environment, although a few controls may have to be applied. Often a blog may be used like a corporate journal integrated into the businesses web site nor internet presence. If it is a top down application of blogging, it will be more controlled animal, pulling the 'corporate line'. Alternatively it could be more organic and bottom up where employees are allowed to voice their own views etc.. This is more dangerous but appears more honest and transparent, When your own employees are evangelising you products from their heart it comes across much more effectively. Often employees will naturally stand up for the business and it's product or services, it is only natural, kind of group instinct. Either way it need to be centralised managed and organised, we at Netmean have realised this and produced solutions based around these models. The blog at the end of the day is just a communication vehicle so business really needs to learn to use it.

More sophisticated examples of collaboration are becoming common place for projects, event management and even election campaigns. In fact many political parties are using content management systems to develop ongoing documentation and records in a dynamic fashion, rather than top down. This situation is common for projects that evolve or involve a large group of people. One cannot try to predict all of the behaviours=r in this kind of situation. Thus one introduces a dynamic information management solution that everyone can access. The important thing here is that access is read and write, it's not publishing it's bidirectional, its value is in the contributions from everyone. It is bottom up rather than top down.

Although I have chosen product categories here like wiki, Blog and CMS, the reality in business is that one usually needs a hybrid of these things. But the parts have to be orchestrated carefully in order to maximise the benefit and reduce duplication or confusion. Once implemented however such solutions provide new and effective means of achieving high productivity with a nice side effect of self documenting (documentation becomes everybody's job at point of process or action).

Question is your business collaborating or is it still publishing ?

P.S. The clever online businesses have been doing this for a while : Amazon with their customers reviews, ebay with their seller ratings, Ecademy with their connections and testimonials.