Category Archives: Collaboration

I have worked across five departments at a Fortune 100 company employing over 90,000 workers distributed around the world. After suffocating in the quicksand of a Lotus Notes inbox full of carbon copies and bloated attachments and wandering across the barren desert of a shared file server, searching hopelessly for the buried treasure of a long lost strategic planning template, the hope and opportunity afforded by modern enterprise collaboration platforms was made painfully obvious.

In response to that personal experience, this paper examines the increasing value of collaboration platforms in the workplace, particularly as used by knowledge workers to support emergent collaboration methods.

Emergent collaboration methods, in turn, are employed to complete unique, dynamic projects across teams, for reducing costs, increasing productivity, and, ultimately, preserving the sanity of millions of hard-working, cubicle-bound employees.

Here are a few questions I will endeavor to answer:

Why are collaboration platforms so useful today?
Is cost-benefit analysis broken when it comes to judging a collaboration platform?
What makes for a successful collaboration platform?

Thank you for reading. Don’t forget to collaborate by leaving your comments at the end!

After all, what kind of story on collaboration would this be if it weren’t result of many revisions built on the input of many contributors? Continue reading →