In an article today in Network Computing Asia, Chan Chi-Loong writes about Collaboration Trends and Managing Its Dynamics.
I am including additional references for Collaboration Taxonomy, following this (long) citation from Chan Chi-Loong's article:
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According to Dr Prabhakar Raghvan, Verity's CTO, the two most important resources a company has can be distilled to just two things: people and knowledge. Creating a knowledge management platform with efficient search functions and a well-defined document management plan can save companies millions - at a fraction of the cost of setting up the system, according to Prabhakar.
...Brian Prentice, senior analyst of Technology Research Services at META Group, strongly believes that collaboration technologies need to be managed more than ever as a profusion of collaboration tools invades the market.
Collaboration technologies are everywhere. A typical organisation might use IBM Domino for e-mail, Microsoft Sharepoint Server for directory services, Plumtree for portals, SAP for resource planning, Siebel for CRM, Oracle for databases, and so on. One of the biggest problems is that these technologies overlap. A shared workspace can be created with the Domino mail server, MS Sharepoint Server, Plumtree portal, and SAP. Besides the redundancy of resources, sometimes these different technologies do not mix that well and end users are inundated with having to learn how to use (or worse, forced to used) all these different applications for different groups. Far from simplifying matters, collaboration technologies actually complicate matters for end users if not properly managed.
Collaboration Taxonomy
One solution to help resolve this from the end user perspective is to establish a collaboration taxonomy. This is a set of guiding principles that correlate business activity and IT solutions with a collaboration focus. By having such a structure, organisations can better identify collaboration needs. This is a starting point for crafting a full-fledged management policy.
Through looking at some of the different aspects of collaboration - individual users, business processes, knowledge communities, intra-enterprises and lifestyle centric processes, a collaboration taxonomy can guide organisations in focusing on the intended returns of each IT investment. From this starting point, it can be extended to see how much work is necessary to integrate each piece into your organisation.
A Collaboration Strategy
META Group believes that a few big vendors like Microsoft and IBM will eventually dominate the market a few years down the road. These vendors were picked because they have strong existing products (e.g. Lotus Notes, Exchange) and a unified strategy for collaboration, rather than singular point products.
"Simplifying things is one of the best ways to empower people to use collaboration technology," says Balaprakash Kasiviswanathan, regional product manager for Asia-Pacific, Microsoft, "and seamless, painless integration from the front-end to the back-end will do this."
Whether META Group's predictions will play out remains to be seen, but there is no doubt that collaboration - e-mail, for example - is one of reasons we frequently employ IT in the first place. Comprising information and people, collaboration is too important to the future of an organisation to be left unmanaged...
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Additional Collaboration Taxonomy References:
A Taxonomy for CSCW (Computer Support for Collaborative Work) Systems,
Blog of Collective Intelligence: Collaborative Taxonomy Archives,
Clemson University, C.R.E.D.O. Lab, Automation in Design Group,
CSCW-98 Workshop,
Mark Klein's Selected Publications on Collaborative Design,
Underlying principles of an online community: The CSCW framework,
Wherewithal: Collaborative Taxonomy Engine.