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In this day and age, we all too often hear about technology being the savior to solve the problem of collaboration in the enterprise. Some folks are talking about this thing called “Enterprise 2.0” and its related solutions as the fix. However, if we take a small trip back down memory lane we will quickly discover that collaboration has been around a long time and we have techniques on how to collaborate effectively. So what has changed in the past five years to make collaboration a hot topic?

In many enterprises the changes include:

• distributed workforces located in different locations, states, and countries
• higher complexity
• an increase in the number of people working on a project
• shorter windows to deliver a product or service to market
• the need to effectively control costs to consistently turn a profit

As many of us have experienced, one of the best collaboration tools we have is face-to-face interaction with a group of people who are working together on a project. What do we like about this mode of interaction? My experiences and observations lead me to think that face-to-face interactions help us build deeper relationship where bonds, trust, and respect are established and earned. A large proportion of the information we get in a face-to-face interaction is not from the words themselves, but rather from body language, tone of voice, and facial expressions. Finally, what is powerful about this mode is that it is synchronous and innate which are important to recognize.

From face-to-face collaboration we learn and use a number of behaviors that help allow other modes of collaboration to be more effective. Some of these critical behaviors are:

• trust, respect, and credibility
• listen
• sharing - your experiences and knowledge; includes mistakes and lessons learned
• visibility and transparency – in actions and communications

So what about technology? Perhaps we should look at technology more as an enabler of collaboration as opposed to the solution. Technology helps us with collaborating across larger teams, across a distributed environment, capturing complex information, and sharing it easily. If we adopt and use the behaviors from above in partnership with collaboration technology we use, then our experiences and value proposition will be higher. Some of the reasons why collaboration technology is more challenging than face-to-face is that it is learned and/or asynchronous; i.e. blogs, forums, video, email, etc.

Think about collaboration as a life-cycle that involves a number of stages to be most effective.

• Stage 1: Face-to-face interaction to create the desired behaviors and relationships
• Stage 2: Define what modes of collaboration are needed for the group of people working together. Have a tool chest from which you can pick and choose the right tools for this situation.
• Stage 3: Develop an online community and presence using the tools selected; and educate everyone on how to use them effectively
• Stage 4: Create opportunities for face-to-face, video conferencing, and/or audio conferencing to sustain the synchronous and innate collaboration.
• Stage 5: Measure and Analyze the use of the collaboration tools to check on adoption and usage. Interview and survey the users to find adaptations that need to be me made along the way.

In summary, start with the fundamental behaviors needed for successful collaboration in your enterprise, establish face-to-face opportunities to create relationships, and then introduce collaboration technology as an enabler and enhancer.