Saturday, May 01, 2004

ZDNet AnchorDesk: All take, no give: why collaboration fails

ZDNet AnchorDesk: All take, no give: why collaboration fails "Recently my team at work embarked on a big project, one that involved a lot of meetings, expansive ideas, and the creation of large strategic documents. In a previous column, I described my experience trying to capture some of the intelligence that emerged in the meetings we held. But we also tried to use technology (collaboration software) to get people to contribute to this project outside of the meetings.
Frankly, it was a disaster. Our collaboration system became a wasteland, a great technological framework with no humanity in it. I lay only part of the blame on the service we were using, Intuit's QuickBase. I've seen similar initiatives based on other technologies fail in almost exactly the same way ours did, so I'm letting Intuit off the hook in this case.
I have seen a small number of collaboration systems succeed, too. But sadly, because I've witnessed more disappointment than satisfaction with these products, I have a better handle on the common failure points."

I suspect this will be a common pattern over the next couple years --
1. Observation: market-leading collaboration software is too hard/expensive/disruptive/whatever.
2. Hypothesis: everything will work if we just use open source instead
3. Eventual realization: there are many good reasons why market-leading collaboration software is market-leading collaboration software, and the current crop of open source collaboration-related stuff doesn't address many of the reasons; reset expectations and go back to step 1...

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