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The Chandler Knowledge Worker

The most robust definition (and the most commonly cited) seems to be found in Barbara Gray's Collaborating: Finding Common Ground for Multiparty Problems. She describes collaboration as "a process through which parties who see different aspects of a problem can constructively explore their differences and search for solutions that go beyond their own limited vision of what is possible."[5] In Collaborative Leadership, David Chrislip and Carl Larson offer a slightly different but also useful definition: "It is a mutually beneficial relationship between two or more parties who work toward common goals by sharing responsibility, authority, and accountability for achieving results."[6]

What Is Collaboration? Wood and Gray say that each definition of collaboration used in the articles reviewed has at least one important element missing. They say that any definition must be able to answer the following: Who is doing what, with what means, toward what ends? "This leads us to create the following revised definition," they write: Collaboration occurs when a group of autonomous stakeholders of a problem domain engage in an interactive process, using shared rules, norms, and structures, to act or decide on issues related to that domain. Stakeholders may have shared or differing interests in a problem domain, and these interests may change over time. Some degree of autonomy is required, or else stakeholders "merge" rather than "collaborate." Rules for governing interactions must be implicitly or explicity agreed upon. Acting or deciding is needed to reach a common objective. The domain is the issue or set of issues that stakeholders are interested in, such as local traffic congestion or a nation's economic health. Wood and Gray say that this definition is general enough to include a wide array of collaborative forms but specific enough to exclude others, such as blue ribbon panels that never meet, corporate mergers, and clubs that have no specific problem-solving objectives. The authors next discuss the other 3 issues confronting a comprehensive theory of collaboration.

The challenge I have been running into is convincing CTOs, CIOs and CKOs that there are network effects. These people have invested heavily in pre-Web 2.0 "knowledge management" solutions. They view blogs and wikis as a threat to the possible success of their existing investments. They fail to realize that adding a wider range of productivity tools to the Intranet will add value to existing tools, rather than take away from them.Do you have any suggestions on how to communicate this.

A short answer to your question is that in such cases an appeal to corporate competitiveness might make the most sense. Enterprise Web 2.0 (or to use the emerging enterprise 2.0 tag) evangelists such as Andrew McAfee and Dion Hinchcliffe are always on the lookout for corporate success stories to publicize. I'd pay close attention to what they have to say. Often in public presentations they are challenged by corporate audiences to "prove that this stuff works." They always like to point to public examples -- when they can -- in order to rise above the hype. Being able to point out that a comparable or competitive company "is doing X already - why aren't we?" can be a powerful motivator.

As a cost-conscious consultant I would first want to know whether the existing knowledge management system can be augmented with newer collaboration, social networking, and relationship management features in order to extend the investments in infrastructure that have already been made.

Work organizations increasingly adopt shared electronic databases. However, employees' unwillingness to contribute to shared resources undermines the utility of such technologies. Current research is limited to either a utilitarian or normative perspective. To advance understanding in this area, this study proposes a three-dimensional framework. It includes the utilitarian and normative perspectives as two complementary dimensions in addition to a third collaborative dimension. Based on this framework, the study identifies three key organizational processes and advances an additive model to predict employees' willingness to contribute to shared electronic databases. An empirical test was conducted to assess the model in a large manufacturing organization. The test showed both significant overall effects of the model and significant main effects of each predictor variable. The article will discuss the findings and address both theoretical and practical implications. Key Words: information sharing • collective action • organizational knowledge • knowledge management • collaboration • communities of practice • identification

There are two ways to go about encouraging adoption of social software: fostering grassroots behaviours which develop organically from the bottom-up; or via top-down instruction. In general, the former is more desirable, as it will become self-sustaining over time - people become convinced of the tools' usefulness, demonstrate that to colleagues, and help develop usage in an ad hoc, social way in line with their actual needs.

These key users should: be open to trying new software be influential amongst their peers, thus able to help promulgate usage have the support of their managers Users who are potential evangelists should be identified at every level of management, not just amongst the higher echelons, or amongst the workforce.

3. Convert key users into evangelists Training in the form of short informal sessions (face-to-face or online) and ongoing on-demand support are the basics for encouraging adoption. Too much training or too formal a setting will put users off, and is usually unnecessary.

multilingual content management. It handles Chinese, Japanese, and even right-to-left languages such as Arabic and Hebrew with ease

Instant, Full-text Searching All content is searchable immediately; even Word documents and PDF files.

business processes part of the document workflow