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The title is a question I hear often when extolling the benefits of ECM and SharePoint. I point out how SharePoint fosters collaboration and the person will look at me and say “I work independently, I don’t collaborate.” The myth of independent activity has a number of flaws, but the fundamental flaw lies in just how impossible independent work is, particularly in a business environment. Busting this myth is an important task for people hoping to advance the state of ECM and increase the acceptance of SharePoint (or any solution) within their organization.

One step in busting this myth is to help people understand that collaboration does require direct interaction. As I write this document, I am collaborating with AIIM. I am following (somewhat) the guidelines they provided for these blog entries, and I am trying to support their efforts to establish a community around SharePoint. My alleged creative activity appears right now to be a singular endeavor, but I know that isn’t the case. The easiest way to get people to realize the collaborative nature of their current task is to ask them to follow the task through time. Where did their work product begin its journey? Where does it go next? With just those two points in the process identified, you can help them to understand that other people are involved and that the quality of their work may impact those people.

Another thing we need to help people understand about collaboration is that the collaborating parties do not have to know each other or even exist in the enterprise at the same time. In our shop, perhaps the most important goal of our ECM project is to support the transfer of institutional knowledge to the next generation staff. I think it might be an order of magnitude harder to see the benefit of helping a future employee than it is to see the benefit of helping a current coworker. This becomes especially difficult when you are being asked to help your replacement and you realize that nobody worked very hard to help you when you started. This is further complicated by the argument that “the next generation employee will work differently…consume web-based content…flex between places and time periods…social media…blah blah blah.” If you introduce too many abstract issues into evidence in order to make your case, you’ve lost.

The final way we can help people understand the concept of collaboration, is to stop using the word. Seriously, “collaboration” ranks up there with “platform” and “synergy” in the degree to which it causes people to sigh when you say it in a meeting.  You might as well toss in "best practices" and a few other words that should be banned forever, because your audience stopped listening a long time ago. When we ask people to support ECM, we are asking them to learn new methods and, often, to do additional work – that’s personal. “Collaboration” doesn’t sound personal; it sounds like a corporate goal. “Helping others” or “helping yourself” might send the same message, but would seem personal. I would try to use more direct terms, unless of course people really are collaborating.