What is Collaboration
Collaboration in a business sense is essentially the process of working jointly with at least one other person typically with the goal of producing something literal and usually leading to the production of something containing intellectual value.
The history of Collaboration
Before the advent of electronic collaboration or collaboration software, the general process for creating collaborative documents or content was time consuming, difficult to enact, often only linear and very manual.
In most organisations, collaboration took two forms;
- documented business processes that required that the information was passed from one place or employee to another, being added to or amended at each stage by each contributor in the process. In this way content such as order forms, complaints, sales enquiries, product development or anything that needed multiple contributions would be (usually) manually transferred through the organisation.
- ad hoc events would be events that could not be turned into a routine of business process - but would require that individuals come together or work together to create a collective output such as meetings.
The evolution particularly of Microsoft Office, Email exchanges and Document Management Systems meant that suddenly content could be converted to electronic format and made available to all contributors in a business process without being manually transferred - for both linear and simultaneous input.
Collaboration todayAs such collaboration software can be found embedded in a number of different applications. All collaboration tools have the primary business benefit of improving the efficiency of how individuals electronically communicate and work jointly with each other - which in turn improves productivity of an organisation and reduces traditional costs associated with the manual processing of collaborative content.
As in the days when collaboration was non electronic, collaboration software tools can be broken down into two main categories - those that are business process centric - and those that are ad-hoc collaborative products.
- a) Business process centric collaboration tools are often more closely linked with the way that a business chooses to run re-occurring events such as purchase orders. For example when an order is received it may have to go through a defined number of actions before a product is shipped. Most process centric tools are given the term 'Business Process Management Software' - aka BPM.
- b) Ad-hoc collaboration tools are everywhere! Within a business environment examples would be email, text messages, calendars, group discussions, online meetings, white-boarding. Other emerging technologies such as chat rooms, bulletin boards, forums and blogs are becoming increasingly popular with the advent of Web 2.0 and are increasingly finding their way into the corporate environments. The main characteristic of an ad-hoc collaboration tool is that it is invoked by the user. For example - content contributor A may decide to send an email to a group of five other contributors B to F - and ask that they look at a word doc they have written and comment or amend - or it could be to arrange an online meeting to discuss a new product idea without having to get everyone to attend a given location.
Both ad-hoc and business process software are centric to many of the more Enterprise Content Management solutions - but both have a place and a value in an organisation. Its also worth considering that even solutions that don't belong to the Gartner ECM Quadrant of Enterprise players have evolved to have integrations with many of the tools that would be included under the banner collaboration software. As a result collaboration is now an extension of many of the other types of Content Management Systems that are available on the market as well as tools in their own rights.