by Roger G. Best

If you read much I’m sure you’ve heard things about how enterprise computing is rapidly heading in the direction of better collaboration and that social media will be a big part of that drive. We’re seeing an ever increasing trend to add social media to enterprise collaboration portals. The corporate need for better collaboration tools has been on the plates of many business professionals for years now.  Everything from things like the telephone (and even the telegraph), fax, telex, email, video conferencing, instant messaging, and on-line chat have all been a part of building a collaborative workplace.

Collaboration has always been a corporate challenge. The phone, the fax, instant messaging, email are all methods by which we can communicate. Each of these have their advantages/disadvantages.  Statistically, the average business person will receive an average of 75 to 125 emails a day, and that doesn’t even include the junk (aka, SPAM).  I have to admit, that I long for the days when I only received 125 messages per day! With this overload of information, it’s sometimes difficult gleaning valuable information from the chatter that’s contending for our attention. 

Most of what I’ve been talking about would all fall within the category of communication. Collaboration, on the other hand, is about taking the next step beyond communicating.  It’s about continuing to involve the right people in a developing stream of events, data transmissions, communications, etc., very few of which are located in the same place.

Do we get better collaboration through Social Media? Blogs, Wikis, Discussion Forums, Podcasts, etc. all improve our ability to educate the corporate workforce. Yet that needs to be a two way street and owned by the people who are actually involved to be effective.

Google Wave adds an interesting twist. There are big claims on both sides of the fence, but any way you look at it, Wave does appear to be a contender in the collaboration arena.  There’s a lot of buzz the Google Wave may even give email a “run for its money” and change the way we communicate, especially in collaborative workgroups.  One of the problems with email is that it can become impossible to follow a thread because there are multiple copies of every message/reply. With Wave there is only one copy that everyone involved will see.  Add to that the ability to allow team members to playback how a conversation developed, and you have a great collaborative tool at your disposal (well, when it makes full release, that is). The ability to do things in real time does mean that we are able to collaboratively build a document involving all the right people and be assured that there is only one copy.

Collaboration however will continue to involve a lot of tools. Social Media is a part of that, especially when used effectively to build a relationship with customers, suppliers, partners, prospects, and the marketplace in general.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 29th, 2009 at 10:27 am and is filed under Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.