Distributed Collaboration: The Future. Now. You Ready?

[MichaelDortch]

From traditional speakerphones and conference calls to Skype, Google Hangouts, and state-of-the-art videoconferencing, we've been finding and using ways to connect geographically dispersed family, friends, and colleagues. Throughout the evolution and widespread adoption of these and other technologies, there has been a single driving force: the desire and need for teams to collaborate, regardless of geographic challenges. Or put another way, the need for distributed collaboration.

This need takes multiple forms, often simultaneously within the same enterprise. A product development team in Silicon Valley needs to have a discussion with a sibling team in Europe or Asia. A marketing team in London needs to meet regularly with sales teams in multiple other locations. Individuals across a global enterprise need to attend live, real-time training in new HR or security policies. And then there's the near-constant stream of one-to-one and few-to-few ad hoc discussions and meetings that drive everyday business operations.

Few if any modern enterprises have all of their employees in one or even a few physical locations all the time. So getting everyone who needs to collaborate into the same location(s) at the same time is unlikely, if not impossible. Distributed collaboration is the only practical alternative.

Distributed collaboration is also much more than just connecting two or more geographically separated people in real time. To be of maximum effectiveness and business value, distributed collaboration should make it as easy for participants to share and manipulate information as it would be if they were all in the same room at the same time.

In December 2014, my friend and industry colleague David Coleman of Collaborative Strategies conducted more than 500 surveys on this subject. Here's a summary of some of his findings.

• Nearly 80 percent of respondents use collaboration tools to coordinate work with another person or team, but 52 percent of respondents felt that their tools and infrastructures did not fully meet their collaboration needs. (Only 33 percent of respondents believed that their current collaboration tools meet even some of their needs.
• Some 70 percent of respondents do most of their distributed collaboration from a laptop. (So they're mobile as well as distributed.)
• Approximately 40 percent of those surveyed spend more than two-thirds of their work time on projects that involve fully or partially distributed teams. And while they spend approximately 15 percent of each week in meetings, 40 percent of respondents use no metrics to assess the effectiveness of those meetings.
• The top three challenges to success with distributed collaboration are the need for better collaboration technologies, more transparent and interactive leadership, and an organizational culture that fosters greater transparency, better communication, and improved coordination.

Clearly, there's work to be done to make effective distributed collaboration a reality at more organizations, perhaps including yours. Of course, if your organization is using ServiceNow, you've already got a head start, thanks to the collaboration features of the ServiceNow Service Automation Platform. But whether you're using those features or not, your enterprise could probably be making better use of tools and resources at its disposal. Your leadership could probably be doing more to foment a more collaborative organizational culture as well.

To help you kick-start your efforts, visit Collaborative Strategies online, subscribe to David's e-newsletter, and download the free e-book, "42 Rules for Successful Collaboration." You might also consider participating in the Distributed Collaboration Summit David's organizing for later this year. And if you're going to Knowledge15 — and you should be — check out the sessions on content management, knowledge management, and other collaboration-related topics.

Nothing meaningful happens in business without collaboration, within and beyond enterprise walls. Make effective distributed collaboration a goal of your "ART-ful enterprise," and collaborate with your colleagues to make that goal a reality.