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Collaboration tools are anti knowledge sharing?

There is a clear need for collaboration within organisations, and the rollout of collaboration tools will bring many benefits. What is not widely recognised, however, is that the unmanaged spread of collaboration tools can work against knowledge sharing.

While collaboration tools work extremely well for the staff using them, they can lead to hundreds (or thousands) of information 'silos', making it harder for other staff to find required information.

This briefing will explore this issue, drawing on experiences gained across many different organisations.

Collaboration works well

Collaboration spaces work very well for the staff using them. Team and project spaces are a particularly good example of this, providing an effective space for team members to communicate and collaborate in.

The ability to 'work in' these spaces is one of their greatest strengths, allowing easy sharing of content, documents, discussions, diaries and more. Far richer than file shares, intranets or document management systems, the current generation of collaboration tools have the potential to deliver considerable productivity benefits.

What also makes these spaces successful is the 'shared context' amongst users. Because they are actively engaged in the ongoing use of these spaces, everyone knows what's happening, and where to find key information.

In practice, collaboration areas naturally evolve to fit the needs of the staff who are using them, with the spaces matching the idiosyncrasies of the groups they serve.

[CM Briefing 2007-17, read the full article]

Posted by jamesr on October 09, 2007 09:59 PM
Categories: Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, Information management, James' articles, Knowledge management