“Collaboration is a structured, recursive process where two or more people work together toward a common goal......by sharing knowledge, learning and building consensus”

Collaboration is about more than just simply working together on a project. It embodies the communication, understanding and knowledge sharing which contributes to successful working methods.

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence therefore, is not an act but a habit” – Aristotle.

As organisations become increasingly dispersed both geographically and functionally, new challenges are emerging for those trying to embed a collaborative culture in their working environment. People have also contributed to this, in the way in which their working habits and interaction with technology such as email and documents have emerged in the past 10 to 15 years.

Consider the diagram in Figure X below, this is a typical situation in a project whereby the flow of information related to the tasks which must be completed is “bottlenecked” through one person – the project manager or team leader:



In this scenario, the only person who has a full view of what is happening is the project manager. This then makes this individual the key to the success of communication and collaboration required to complete all tasks. However, with so much information (emails, and documents) to manage, this individual will struggle to focus on the most important tasks because they will suffer from “information overload”. It also detracts from the knowledge of the other participants, as they only see a small siloed view of the project.

The “Wiki-Way” (figure X) suggests that the information/content related to the tasks of a project is more important than the organisation and function of the people involved. Each participant can equally view all relevant information (which they are permitted to view based on their role) without having to request it or having to search through their email inbox for it.



Now, the burden of managing multiple streams of communication is removed from the project manager. Each participant on the project can keep up-to-date with what is happening automatically through notification and the “dashboard” on the wiki homepage.

The project manager can now focus on what is most important – managing the project. This same theory can be applied to many other scenarios other than pure project collaboration. The same can work for group secretaries, committee members, or even local team wiki’s.

There are many lessons to be learned from the popularity of the social networking sites which have emerged over the last 10 years. People are attracted by the base principle that these sites facilitate our need to be socially connected. The personal pages which are the homepage for each individual make the interaction familiar and easy to use. The notification services allow individuals to keep up-to-date with what is happening in their “network”.

These benefits or best practices can be used within the enterprise (Enterprise 2.0), to allow people to connect with each other based on a functional requirement to participate on a project or group. They can easily share documents with others without having to email them to every participant. They can comment on and update content as required without the traditional delays of the “pass the parcel” with document versioning etc.