Part 3 of "Communicate, Collaborate, Coordinate, Decide: How IT Achieves Strategic Leadership," our article in Cutter IT Journal, November '08
Part 2 is here.
Part 1 is here.
Collaboration: Technology and Behaviors
Collaboration has two dynamics — technology and behaviors — that intertwine to successfully function in far-flung organizations.3 However, in our view, it’s only 10% technology; the other 90% is people.
Most global organizations are rapidly backing into the new mainstream world of virtual work, adopting technologies that collapse space and time while still using antiquated ideas and behavioral skills about meetings, teams, and organizations. Without new behaviors and organizational designs, the great potential of the new connective technologies remains largely fallow.
For example, IT may provide facilities for audio conference calls and Web conferencing (screen sharing), which are critical capabilities for virtual teams. While IT usually provides documentation and technology training, rarely does it also offer quick tips, education, and detailed practices on how to use the new facilities in a virtual team context. Meanwhile, organizations are crying out for education about:
- How to have good conference calls
- When and how to conduct virtual meetings
- How to lead virtual meetings
- How to coach others to have great meetings
- How to lead high-performing virtual teams
Thus, IT finds itself needing to partner with other organizations to provide the behavioral side of the collaboration equation.
The second key area of technology for virtual work is a repository for anytime/anywhere access. Since the dawn of the Internet, research has shown that virtual groups are far more likely to succeed when they have common work products and private places to store and retrieve them.4 However, what’s needed today is much more than content management in isolated team rooms.
Today’s online workplaces and collaboration platforms present users with an awesome list of tool parts that they can configure and deploy — if only they had some way of knowing how to start from an empty room and turn it into a cleverly designed shared space.
Technology is best when shaped with an eye to human behavior. Team rooms can be tailored to incorporate the principles and practices of good teaming, such as clarifying and articulating purpose, providing transparency in order to build trust, and communicating with your larger network of relationships. New technologies can strengthen the adoption of new behaviors, and vice versa.
In the Teams of Leaders project, the BCKS adopted our virtual team model — People, Purpose, Links, and Time5 — for the design of both collaboration training and the online leader team rooms (see Figure 2). To reflect needs common to all teams, we tailored a team room template on Microsoft’s SharePoint collaboration platform, which could be used as a starting point and a learning environment for best practices. As the teams inhabit the rooms, their “walls” become personalized and articulated as the teams spell out their specific purposes and discuss their processes.
When team rooms are tailored for consistency and ease of use across many groups, people can work in multiple teams and expect to find common information in the same places. We often compare setting consistent online areas for information related to people, purpose, and the like to being able to find the light switch in roughly the same place in a physical room. It may be outside the door or inside it, to the left or to the right, but you don’t have to go on a treasure hunt each time you need to flip the switch, which is something like what people experience online right now. There is little consistency in the placement of information, and a lot of time evaporates as people hunt for the simplest “data.” We are not the only ones calling for consistency in online team environments, to be sure, and the vendors have done their best to snatch what they regard as common elements and build them into their offerings. Unfortunately, most are feature-driven, which makes them technologically rich but, generally speaking, not driven by the way people actually work.
IT is typically short on behavioral skills and knowledge itself, so it needs to partner with another function, usually HR, to successfully establish the new behaviors required to achieve true organization-wide proficiency. Working together, HR and IT can couple virtual leadership methodology with collaboration technology to support high-performance virtual working.
HR (or Learning, or Education, or Training, for example) is already in the business of leader development, which means that IT can partner with that function to integrate the behavioral aspects of working virtually into existing curricula, or to create new training. Volvo IT, for example, now provides the Information Worker Package, a virtual team service package comprising technology tools and behaviors co-crafted with HR but delivered by IT.
Figure 2