Building a Collaboration Roadmap

Author: Andrea Waugh-Metzger, IBM

January 2010

Collaboration isn't just about tools.  It's not about having the right email system or finding the right document management tool that your people will like and use.  It's about how people work.  Collaboration is bringing people together, making them more productive and increasing their access to information.  So, when we talk about collaboration roadmaps, we aren't just talking about the tools that can help people work better.  We're talking about helping people work smarter.

So, how do you build a collaboration roadmap?  Well, first, you need to understand that a new model of collaborative work is emerging.  Today, most of the value or knowledge in your environment might be driven by your regular, long-term employees.  Workers typically identify with the firm and work centers around the organization.  The firm's structure is defined and hierarchical with roles and skills that are specified and delineated.  Moving forward however, the definitions we had for the firm and how people work in the firm are changing. The workforce is becoming more fluid, with cross-department teams and integration with business partners, vendors and customers.  The firm's structure and workforce roles are constantly changing with new ones emerging and combining.  Workers identify with peers more and reputation and individual knowledge become career identifiers.  It's a whole new state of working.

Now that you understand how collaboration is changing in the workforce, we can leverage that to think about what collaboration means within the company and take the first steps to creating your roadmap.   When you create your collaboration roadmap, there are four aspects the roadmap should cover – I like to think of them as the “Four Good For's”.

First – your roadmap should be good for your end-users.  It should provide a way for users access people and teams across the entire organization with anytime access so they can get information when they need it.  It should encourage artful problem solving and provide a structured, contextual framework within which to collaborate and develop and share intellectual assets.

Second – your roadmap should be good for your business.  It should allow you to deliver higher quality of products, reduce your time-to-market and improve customer mandates through real-time participation, co-authoring, brainstorming and unstructured contributions.  

Third – your roadmap should be good for your CEO.  It should help drive growth by empowering vibrant communities of people.  It should help your CEO stay connected to the “pulse” of the organization and close the “feedback loop” between employees, vendors and customers.

Finally – lest we forget – your roadmap should be good for your IT department.  Your roadmap should extend your existing assets and investments, use capabilities that integrate with what you already have and know and avoid rip and replace.  Ideally, your roadmap will help you reduce IT support through self-service to employees and will help you improve your IT ROI.

Now – those sound like tall orders, I know! But, not all companies are alike, and not all companies are at the same point in adoption of collaboration capabilities.  And so, the next step in creating your collaboration roadmap is to take what you've learned so far and create a set of desired collaboration capabilities and map them to a collaboration maturity model – this is the basis for your roadmap.  

A typical maturity model would have basic or core collaboration capabilities at the low end of the curve – with things like basic email and calendar functions.  Then, users could mature into more on-demand access features like unified communications and integrated user profiles. Finally, at the top end of the curve is advanced collaboration with full integration into social computing, mashups, portals and integrated data/voice/video.  As you outline this curve in your roadmap, make sure you provide “pockets” for early adopters so they can move up the maturity model faster and embrace advanced collaboration capabilities to help them work smarter.

Once you create your capabilities matrix, you will need to determine your service capabilities gap. The gap is a rating that combines how complex the business effort is vs. the technical effort to provide the desired capability.   This combined rating will help provide the implementation phases and methods for the capabilities on your roadmap.

Then, determine key performance indicators that map back to your “Four Good For's” and that can help you indicate success along the way.  And finally, make sure you include a good marketing and communications plan that provides adoption guidance as well as a “sales kit” to help you sell your roadmap to the organization and gain Line of Business support and stakeholders.

And there you have it!  The key to working smarter!  A collaboration roadmap can take you into the future of collaboration and help you make the most of your employees and your business!  It's the key to unlocking a smarter way of working – one that can help propel your business to the next level.

Andrea Waugh-Metzger is a Collaboration Evangelist and Subject Matter Expert at IBM in the Lotus Software Group.  She has been working with collaboration technologies for over 12 years in various roles - from technical specialist to solution architect to implementation architect.  She has spent the last 3 years focusing on helping customers understand how to overcome business challenges with disparate workers and improve productivity through the use of collaboration tools.  She resides in the greater Dayton, OH area and can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it