In the last post, we look at whether organizations have a collaboration strategy – we some decidedly mixed results. Today, the question is: Who drives your organisation’s collaboration strategy?
These are the results that we got (N=37):
The numbers don’t necessarily add up with those in the previous question (which has got our backroom statisticians all of a flutter) but if we take them at face value then the answer is “it depends” and “almost everyone”. IT is the biggest group. This we expected – what came as something of surprise was the narrowness of IT’s lead.
What have your experiences been in who’s involved – and who’s not – in collaboration strategy development? Should we see more leadership from senior executives or core business units in this area?
OzCollab - The Australian Collaboration Software Report 
I find this quite facinating that this question really doesn’t align with the next one either… “do you have a strategy”. I wonder how many “people-focused” functions have a strategy compared to “technology-focussed” functions.
The “build it and they will come” attitude is now archaic, however it seems to have been unfortunately replaced with “hey lets put it in and see what happens”. People-focussed streams seem to understand that users demand more usable and useful systems and that stakeholders demand ROI on business goals. One thing that seems to be forgotten in the whole “collaboration revolution” is that we collaborate already. How fantastic must new technology be to get us off our phones and email, or is the expectation that we must now monitor internal AND external networking sites, email, personal mobiles, blackberries /iphones / laptops/desktops daily?
Acknowledging that we don’t live in a perfect world where strategies always drive implementations (and the cart rides behind the horse at all times), at least having some ownership of the successful implementation AND Change Management is much more important than installing the newest software on an enterprise server.