Controlling collaboration, or not

Everyone is talking about making workers more productive as they work together. Gartner calls it the "High Performance Workplace." Forrester has a research division focused on "Content and Collaboration." There are a lot of technologies that can be brought to bear in this collaboration or "knowledge worker" area, from Email to IM to discussion forums to rich collaboration clients.

The major software players each have a swath of offerings, from Microsoft's viral SharePoint offerings to IBM's Workplace family, to the Oracle platform. Then of course are the myriad other email and IM clients, so-called "social software" tools like Wikis, many of which are hosted, open source, or both.

But the question I hear most from IT departments is not how to bring in all this new technology, but rather, how to control it, contain or scale it properly, or otherwise keep it from being a risk? Indeed, many of the major players in the space are pinning their market hopes on giving IT the best means of control. IBM's Workplace Managed Client is an Eclipse-based offering that enables IT to remotely deploy rich client functions without the risks of browser add-ins. Microsoft's Office 2007 features "back end" server elements for file sharing that for the first time extends Office off the desktop (which they can do under the SharePoint banner).

There is a nagging problem here, however. In fact, I'm ready to make...

Contention number two: Collaboration cannot be controlled.

The story goes like this: New collaboration tool comes on the market. Individuals get excited, then get their departments to adopt it virally. Widespread use soon makes it a headache to manage and it is flipped over to IT and the organization as a whole, whether they wanted it or not. They in turn spend a lot of time getting it controlled; establishing proper roll-out procedures, add some workflow and better tracking, a proper directory, scalability. People tire and stop using it. New collaboration tool comes on the market. Repeat.

This happened to some degree or another with Email - which was once a system you could send any thought or passing idea to anyone else (and is now the equivalent of formal written inter-office memos.) It was repeated with "Groupware" aka Lotus Notes/Domino . Is it any wonder that just as IM nears the manageability phase, many workers are getting more excited about setting up some kind of social software?

This isn't IT's fault. Typically, they were given no warning, and bent over backwards to keep it running. This is about how people work together. The phenomenon can best be explained by example: a remote colleague of mine recently asked if we could set up a wiki to compare our thoughts because "I haven't thought through some of this enough to enter into the Team Room yet."

In other words, the more you control it, the more formal the system seems to the people using it, and this by definition makes it less about collaboration. People who are "just collaborating" don't want to go "on record." Instead they'll drift to some other software. Some other place you don't control.

And they'll all think it's the coolest thing ever!