8 Comments on “The facets of collaboration part 5: It’s all Gen-Y’s fault – or is it?

  1. I went today throughout the complete series and have thoroughly enjoyed reading it. Having had the opportunity to read (and hopefully understand) the model has given me additional tool for interpreting claims (and counter claims) concerning the importance of Social Media in the context of project management. There seems to be some confusion (somewhat deliberate I suspect) between the role that social media plays in PM vs. the gradually increased collaborative activities taking part in the context of PM.

    Thanks again for an excellent write-up of this topic.

    Cheers, Shim.

  2. Thanks Shim for the feedback – I really appreciate it. I agree with the confusion, but nevertheless its valuable for both sides. Although when I developed the model, the primary purpose was for information architecture decisions, it does seem to be useful in quite a few scenarios. For example, I do believe in strongly in government 2.0 for example, but not the simplistic, idealistic solutions that seems to dominate discussions. Having performed dialogue mapping in urban planning for the community (which is the true engagement that the 2.0 ideals espouse), problems are messy and any collaboation on them that requires shared learning will also be messy. While we have new channels and tools by which to perform this, wicked problems will continue to be wicked problems.

    regards

    Paul

  3. Just a note of thanks for this well done series. Lots of good stuff to think about and help me move forward, in SharePoint as well as online tools in general.

    -John

  4. Great series as always. I’ve been a big fan of your work for a while. A one-size fits all approach to collaboration is ridiculous like you mention, but that is also why collaboration offers such promise to companies. Unlike pure transactional best practices which aim to cut costs and can be easily repeated by competitors, making better decision by marrying tacit information with transactional information provides a great opportunity to regain a sustainable competitive advantage.
    It’s a very hard thing to accomplish (again this is a good thing from a competition standpoint) for a variety of reasons, which you have communicated so well in this series. I think one of the opportunities within the SharePoint world revolves around building targeted communities that marry tacit knowledge using the social features, with the transactional data and processes. This marriage provides the most value when applied to larger initiatives in an organization – but SharePoint is rarely involved in those conversations because of the way it is usually introduced in a company – via the bottom up approach.
    Team Sites are the most common usage of the system, which by their nature, are meant for smaller departmental teams, not companywide processes that involve multiple functions. I believe this is the next step for the SharePoint community – to raise the utilization of the system from an ad-hoc collaboration solution that has provided value with point solutions, to a platform that is supporting top-down, strategic collaboration initiatives. How you have dug into the facets of collaboration can play a big role in helping SharePoint professionals have a more intelligent conversation with high-level executives.
    I always love reading your blog because you make your audience think. Great work. I hope your IA workshop is coming to North America (Dallas, TX if possible).

  5. Hi Ben

    The class will be in Seattle, Toronto, maybe DC and likely New York in May. Can you get to one of these?

    Paul

  6. Great series. My question is why does Charile’s enterprise 2.0 work when SP2010 has a similar feature set? Is it that Charlie and his cohort are simply more tech literate (and capable) than traditional office workers?

  7. Charlie reflects a certain ideal. Whether it really exists or not is debatable 🙂

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