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A lot of the projects I work on involve generating ideas and user interfaces for systems to get collaboration happening for organisations. Many business decision makers are all too aware of collaboration’s benefits, but struggle to make their systems realise these benefits. One of the reasons could be a lack of a rational model underlying the system changes needed.

I find collaboration is a lot like religion: most people already think they know what collaboration is, could talk about it a bit, but probably haven’t really fully experienced it. It’s something other people do. A big reason for this is the language we use: we tend to talk about it in terms of its outworkings, motherhood statements, and end products. Do these sound familiar:

• Collaboration will deliver more innovation
• Collaboration will make us more efficient and more profitable
• Collaboration will strengthen brand loyalty
• Collaboration will enable more effective management
• Collaboration will reduce greenhouse gas emissions
• Collaboration will end war and bring about world peace

…OK, you get the point. We can’t help but think about collaboration in grandiose hyperbole. What business decision makers are often left with is a big chasm between collaboration’s great promises, and the right systems and interfaces to actually get it happening. I think we need to speak more in terms of information models, and start with the patterns and habits that people are already used to. I think we can speak more in terms of good old stock-in-trade for Information Arhictects: finding, organising and sharing information.

Finding information: moving beyond keywords

Search is big. I mean, really big. Google has spawned not only its own verb, but new approaches to searching and sifting through information that others are adding innovative thinking and features to all the time (like Clusty and Vivisimo).

Search is crucial for collaboration because we’re always going to approach information in terms of what we want more than what we can give. It’s time that the various comprehensive search features out there were made more available inside organisations’ systems. Searching for information has to be integrated (searching several systems at once), contextual (offering more relevant results related to your tasks) and predictive (offering avenues that you might not have anticipated).

When predictive search works together with integrated and contextual search, organisations can better anticipate what issues lie over the horizon, giving them an edge over their competition.

Organising information: moving beyond folders

Information is traditionally organised into files, folders and business areas. Think of your average office intranet, and the way your files are arranged on your server; everything is probably arranged by the organisation chart. The server probably has a big folder called ‘Clients’, with hundreds of folders for specific projects inside. This type of thinking arises from the more traditional metaphors we’re used to, like filing cabinets, rolodexes and business cards. It works up to a point, but it relies more and more on keeping that mental model of the structure in your head.

This creates issues when new uninitiated staff arrive, when the organisation restructures, and so on. This approach can also limit scalability, place too much reliance on technology and hold back organisations’ potential.

A more useful model puts the person at the centre of the information, and organises everything by connections. Connection-based categorisation adds a new dimension of relevance to information management, and allows a more flexible, agile and future-proof way of finding and working with information.

For example, every document on your server probably belongs to some sort of project, case or other discrete unit. It has one or more authors, one or more versions, and so on. Every author has a relationship to that project (a role to play, duration they’re on the project), relationships to the other authors, and other similar projects that they have worked on. And each of those projects has its own relationships.

Get the idea? Mapping this sort of metadata reveals connections that users may not be aware of, and aid in searching, browsing and adding richer meaning to that document. One example of this in action is the way LinkedIn displays connections to other people that you’re linked to. It does this to give greater context to connections, and reveal other people you may not have known about, or may not know that your connection is connected to.

Here’s a table comparing the ways organising information by connections can help:

This approach doesn’t necessarily mean replacing existing organisation practices and technology. It means adding the connection management layer to make your existing organisation more effective.

Sharing information: moving beyond email

Sharing information is actually an oxymoron to a lot of people; there are many people who have got to where they are precisely because they don’t share information, and perhaps are specifically required not to. But for the rest of us who aren’t spies or lawyers, there can still be a culture of only sharing information when we have the time and when we’ll profit from it.

But let’s assume we are sharing information. It typically means relying on technology that is simply not purposed for collaboration. It typically means using email messages to do the sharing, and the inbox to do the collecting, which presents all sorts of limitations in terms of file versions, decentralisation and difficulty in finding information. Collaboration can instead be fostered with the following factors:

• Openness – the more people are present and able to contribute in a collaborative space, the more useful it is. A knowledge management system open to only a few authors won’t be used as much as a more multi-author (or wiki) based system.
• Trust – information has to have credibility and authority to be relied upon.
• Convenience – the easier it is to seek and contribute information, the more the system will be used.
• Context – people have more incentive to use collaborative tools when they are seamlessly available as a part of the work they are already doing.
• Personalisation – offering features that let people customise the system to the way they work increases use and usefulness.

Start with the information design

Effective collaboration systems should start with a clear articulation of the information model, and the way that an organisation’s people are to use that model. Getting used to talking about the information design rather than the high-falutin’ benefits will help these sorts of projects actually succeed.

It will also help in resolving sticky issues like governance in systems that express the points of openness (above). It will help to strike the right balance between ‘top-down’ governance, corporate-regulated roles, permissions and information management, and ‘bottom-up’ open contribution and sharing.

It will help change a system people have to use to a system people will rely on. Amen to that!

I’ve recently been on some client projects involving online collaboration, or at least trying to get online collaboration happening. There are many reasons why online collaboration won’t work, and here’s 10 of them… and what we can do about it.

To set the scene a bit, these responses are geared to be read by ‘the client’, to educate and persuade them to embrace online collaboration. The scenarios can be applied to online applications like forums, wikis, and other internal groupware applications.

1. We already collaborate offline, so we don’t need to do it online

That’s great if you’re already collaborating. If you and your organisation’s staff already have a culture of sharing learnings and information, committing spontaneous acts of assistance and feedback, then online collaboration tools should actually help you do more of the same. Realistically, all the collaboration applications around should support existing activities like these, not replace them.

2. No-one wants to be seen to not know the answer

A lot of online collaboration models rely on the assumption that everyone will be free to ask questions and have them answered. That’s fine if it’s part of a forum website with global reach (like Yahoo Answers), and with anonymous askers/answerers…but inside your own organisation? Who wants to look naive by asking ‘who looks after the Government client accounts’?

Solution? Give people the option to ask anonymously. This option could be set either at the user account level to apply to all questions, or at the point where the question is being entered. And if there are any instances where it’s possible to view all questions by a particular user account, it just wouldn’t show the ones tagged to be anonymous.

3. I - and my staff - won’t trust the content/answers/comments being posted

Ah yes, the issue of authenticity. People can often be suspicious of the validity of online content, since it’s well known that anyone can put anything online and call themselves an expert. Sometimes people need to be reminded that for closed systems such as staff intranets and internal applications, there are checks and balances in place. You already know who the people are in your own organisation. You will know who creates and edits what. There is accountability.

Using Issue #2 above, although you could make asking questions anonymous, any responses posted would always include the identity of the poster.

4. It’s a time waster/my staff should be working, not playing around on a forum/blog/wiki

Everyone has a story about how the company they work for — or a friend’s company — has prohibited and prevented access to sites like Facebook. But there’s plenty of evidence around now that online collaboration enhances teamwork, solves problems faster, boosts morale, and actually promotes the same healthy work practices that corporate leadership would have everyone doing anyway.

There are two issues here. The first issue is the word ’social’ in social media and social networking. The word ’social’ is kryptonite to the ears of managers, and is best avoided. Using words like ‘knowledge management, ‘knowledge captial’ and ‘intellectual capital’ is much better.

Secondly, there may be misconceptions about exactly what actions constitute online collaboration. Business applications can use the sorts of tools we find in (ahem) social media websites for employees to contribute work-related content. I would post photos of my pet dog on Facebook, but not at work; at work I would post photos of the new office in Melbourne for the Sydney employees to see.

5. My staff won’t share information, no matter what

This is more common in some domains than others, such as legal and accounting. After all, in a culture where advice has a hefty price tag attached, and accountability is paramount, why risk giving out opinions and factoids willy nilly? Often when asked to collaborate, some staff and teams immediately think of the big things, rather than the small things.

Usually collaboration isn’t so much about giving a thesis on competition law in New Zealand from 1994-1999… it’s about things like: ‘whose turn is it to buy the coffee?’ ‘Has anyone worked with the version of XYZ software?’ ‘The café downstairs has a special offer on banana bread’… and so on.

6. No time

This is fair enough, and true. Online collaboration tools should save time, not be an extra thing that employees have to find time for. There may be cases where employees have had systems thrust upon them with a mandate to use them, where it then takes longer to do certain tasks.

The right online collaboration system(s) should of course save time. Not often by replacing another system, but by exposing more of the information already captured in ways that are relevant to people right when they need it.

7. Confidentiality

Some organisations may think that the risk of sharing the wrong sort of information is too great. Like Issue #3, there would be checks and balances in place to safeguard such confidentiality breaches.

It should be said that email is probably the biggest culprit of confidential information leakage of all time. Moving employees away from email (for work-related communication such as projects, cases, and business processes) and more towards using a centralised collaboration system like Basecamp — where all communications are around specific project assets — would actually be more secure.

8. Some people may not actually be qualified to give appropriate answers

This also relates to Issue #3. Risks of erroneous information publishing can be mitigated by using corporate-set expertise tags against employees’ user accounts, so that they can only ’see’ and reply to questions and issues for areas in which they have a reasonable degree of skill and expertise.

9. Haven’t we already got an intranet?

The main problem with intranets since their inception is that they are designed ‘top-down’ and too corporate-lead, rather than placing each individual user at the centre of the online experience, which is why they’re infamous for not being used. Successful collaboration tools place the user and their work/role at the centre, solving their problems, not giving them new ones.

If your intranet already does that, great! But if you’re part of the other 99.9% of employees out there, it’s time you were using a new collaborative intranet.

10. It’s too expensive

Many organisations have been scarred by experiences dealing with Enterprise This and Enterprise That. It seems that putting the word ‘Enterprise’ in front of any software or web application automatically adds a couple of zeros to the licencing fees. Please avoid these at all costs. Break free from your hulking legacy systems and start light. Look at applications like Basecamp for project asset collaboration and sharing, Huddle, Google Apps and Confluence for groupware, Ning and the like for networking…the list is endless.

Fight the good fight

If you’re like me and often trying to sell the idea of online collaboration and its benefits, I hope this raises some interesting issues for you. It helps me to remember this great quote by Howard Aiken: “Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down peopl’s throats.”

I have the privilege of sitting next to some smart gents this Saturday as part of the Arriving and staying on the web panel session at the Create Conference 08, and one of the ideas I’d like to throw out there is the idea of turning your website inside out.

What I mean is this: say you were after a copy of the Rolling Stones’ Flowers album (hey, it’s got Ruby Tuesday on it, what a great song). Where would you go to get it? These days you might shop at iTunes, or Amazon, or countless other online avenues. Or you might scour some second-hand music stores. No doubt you would go to where music is available for sale.

Now say you had a copy of that album to sell. Would you keep it on the shelf and hope someone will knock on the door and ask to buy it? Unless your house is a famous music museum, you’re probably going to take out an ad somewhere where you know people will read ads for music to buy. Or maybe you’ll take it to the second-hand music store to sell. The point is: you would go to where people are who would want to buy it, to tell them about it.

Obvious? In my line of work, I often find that people build websites assuming that others will knock on their door to buy that album, then (understandably) get discouraged when it doesn’t sell.

Go to where people are

We should be taking the content of our websites to where people are already congregating, not just ads to try to get people to leave what they’re doing and visit our websites. There are so many websites around these days that thrive on communities sharing their content with each other. Whether it’s for fun, like photos and videos on facebook, MySpace and flickr, or to make a coin, like on Etsy or Threadless.

There are loads of opportunities for creative thinking to take our websites’ content ‘out of the house’ and into the street to where people can see it, engage with it, share it, have a conversation about it — be it to promote events, news, topical articles, relevant services and products — whatever you and your business have a passion for.