[from
Beyond Collaboration: Immediacy]
So-called collaboration is just not enough
It seems that you can't even turn around without bumping into another company touting its platform for collaborative commerce, or a new ASP solution geared to helping organizations effectively collaborate, or yet another consulting firm positioning a new service focused on building collaborative B2B exchanges. For those of us who have been tracking the frontier of collaborative technology this might seem to be the millennium at last, when we can stop evangelizing and really start rocking-and-rolling. But just as the core value proposition for collaboration appears to have become inextricably engrained in the infrastructure of all strategic information technologies, the world may be looking for something else. Something better. Something bigger. Something realer.
Whoa! Better than collaboration? Doesn't that smack of heresy? Doesn't everything good come from collaboration, after all? Well, sorta. Kinda.
The Myth of The Collaborative Business
Perhaps we have been reading too, too many press releases, because the buzz about collaboration is everywhere, and the term has been thrown around so broadly that it just can't mean anything serious anymore.
A new myth, the archetypal collaborative business, has taken hold in the collective unconscious of the digerati. In such a business, all sorts of spontaneous innovation is happening, bursting out from every cubicle, arising from the socializing influence of high-tech, cooperative work. This is in effect the most recent incarnation of The-Technology-Formerly-Known-As-Groupware (as typified by Lotus Notes in the mid-90s). With the Internet implosion in the late '90s, groupware wasn't just for "groups" – departments or teams within the enterprise – any longer. The dream of extraprise interactions – virtual networks, knowledge supply chains, and one-to-one dialog with customers – led to a wholesale repurposing of so-called "groupware," without really moving the core set of features very far from the ancestral homelands.
The core of the myth – and where it really is mythical – is that the basic elements of groupware actually meet the most critical communication needs of today's businesses. Much of what makes up "collaborative technologies" has become so ubiquitous and dispersed that we can't really turn up a technology that isn't collaborative. Like the term 'digital.' What isn't digital? When everything is digital, the word digital becomes an irrelevancy. Likewise, in a world where every word processor, every photo-sharing ASP, every CRM tool, and every PDA support collaboration, the term 'collaboration' has become as devalued as the Turkish Lira.
