Introduction

Supporting collaborative working has only emerged as an intranet requirement over the last few years, largely as a result of the launch of SharePoint 2007 towards the end of 2006. Of course, there had been collaborative applications before SharePoint 2007 (including SharePoint 2003 and Lotus Notes), but a combination of marketing, functionality and a strong business requirement has brought collaborative applications to the very top of the requirements list of senior managers. This presents a substantial challenge for an intranet manager, because most intranets probably use a CMS application that means they are, essentially, information publishing platforms. WCMSs were not designed to support the often document-intensive world of collaboration, to which social media applications have been bolted on as an afterthought.

The situation is now changing rapidly and an important and farreaching governance decision is whether the provision and management of collaboration applications should be the responsibility of the intranet manager. This chapter does not set out to be a treatise on collaboration, but only to highlight the issues that should be considered by the intranet team.

The value of collaboration

In 1624 the English metaphysical poet John Donne remarked:

A more recent poet, John Lennon, wrote in one of the Beatles’ songs, ‘I get by with a little help from my friends’. In whatever role we play in an organization, the decisions we have to make are challenging ones, and there is a natural urge to share the risk in making a decision, even if it means we may not get all of the due reward. The critical success factors for collaboration, based on the work by Morten T. Hansen,1 include:

An excellent list of actions that can be taken to achieve excellence in collaboration has been proposed by Logan and Stokes: