OzCollab – The Australian Collaboration Software Report

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?

Over the next month, Keith & Matt will be posting the interim results of the OzCollab survey.

So the first question we are going to look at is: “Does your organisation have a collaboration strategy?” (N=39)

For most respondents, the answer seems to be “we kinda do”, followed by “no”. For me, this reply indicates the immaturity of thinking about collaboration technology within organizations. It just happens. It’s not formalized. This might be workable when you have a small number of options (e.g. email) but the collaboration software landscape gets more diverse, it helps to explicitly work through what you need and why.

So there is an opportunity here for practitioners, vendors & consultants to make some of this stuff clearer for businesses.

What do you think?

I would also accept that the question is worded quite loosely and it would be interesting to find out what “informal” means.

Tomorrow: Who owns the strategy?