Collaboration: All Together Now - ' Page 3 '
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People
Worst-case scenario: You build it and nobody comes. Take it slow and sell
the technology to all prospective users.
Says Collaborative Strategies' Coleman: "Eighty percent of collaboration issues
are people related. CIOs need to understand that. Collaboration is a behavior.
The CIO can provide the infrastructure and the applications, but it is the behavioral
changes that will present the most challenges."
Honeywell International Inc. tackled those challenges head-on two years ago,
when it began looking around for technology to help groups of employees collaborate
more effectively on specific projects across time zones and geographic locations.
The company chose Microsoft Corp.'s SharePoint, which allows employees to create
Web sites, invite coworkers to join discussions and post documents. According
to Ramon Baez, CIO and vice president of IT for Honeywell's $8 billion automation
and control solutions group, the group's 27,000 information workers—located
in 700 offices around the world—now rely on SharePoint for collaboration.
The marketing department uses SharePoint in order to work outside the firewall
with customers, while the global IT team uses it to coordinate its technology
efforts. While Microsoft may tout the fact that users don't need to involve
IT staff to set up a SharePoint site, Baez recognized that without an awareness
campaign, followed by education and training, few would use the new system.
For starters, Honeywell chose the name "TeamRooms" because it sounded friendly.
"We thought it would make more intuitive sense to business people," says Baez.
The company generated interest in TeamRooms by sending out an internal "press
release" that included a call to action: "Click on this link to start your own
TeamRoom today." The sign-up process was simple, and the browser-based interface
provided a familiar look and feel for anyone using a Web browser. Honeywell
also set up a special hotline with people who were knowledgeable about TeamRooms.
The effort paid off: Within a month, Honeywell employees created more than 500
TeamRooms. Today, roughly 2,000 are in use.
So far, most CIOs are taking a measured approach to new collaboration tools.
This helps mitigate the risks involved in deploying an expensive piece of software,
and gives users plenty of time to adjust their behavior. "It's all about graceful
escalation," says Spataro of Open Text. "You might start by giving the user
IM," he says. "Then move into shared workspaces, followed by Web conferencing
and so forth."
That's especially true where older workers are involved. Despite the overall
success of TeamRooms at Honeywell, Baez acknowledges that not all information
workers approach them with enthusiasm. "People who aren't tech savvy aren't
going to go to a TeamRoom. But they are a dying breed. You have young people
coming into the workforce now who grew up with computers in their bedrooms.
Computers are second-nature to them." Collaboration tools may be only the most
recent example of a technology that highlights the workforce generation gap,
but CIOs and business managers alike would still do well to adopt the "graceful
escalation" approach, allowing workers the option of participating in trials
with new tools.
Ask your HR department:
What impact might new collaboration tools have on employee morale?
Ask your IT staff:
Do we have a safety net for employees who might resist a new collaboration
approach?
Ask your CFO:
How can we measure the ROI of new collaborative tools?
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