Enterprise collaboration, cartels and confidentiality

Naturally is the operative word. How does one manage a natural function?

A few years ago, I participated in a meeting in which several different agencies discussed data management software. When the representative for the General Services Administration explained the availability of shared services, meeting attendees understood the potential cost savings. By using software already licensed, the time and cost for launching a new initiative could be slashed. The talk was positive, but the concept of shared services has been making only modest progress.

Collaboration was useful in the meeting. But once the agency representatives got back to home base, it was business as usual. Each agency focused on its budget, its headcount and its ability to get plum projects. Information gained in collaboration was valuable. Its use, in my experience, was primarily selfish. The value of collaboration was to further quite narrow goals. Even in the government, collaboration was useful if it furthered an agenda. Within a single government unit, self-interest and other agendas retained their grip on decision-making. The behavior is natural and automatic in most cases.

Challenges ahead

As organizations take steps to provide social and collaborative communications to employees, are vendors of knowledge enabling services prepared to address these challenges? They include:

• preserving confidential and other sensitive information for employee use only;
• generating usage among those employees who use Facebook as a way to share information, form relationships and find information for personal and business use;
• justifying the cost of proprietary collaboration tools that, in effect, operate alongside consumer services; and
• ensuring that governance and regulatory constraints are functioning to avoid legal issues and to minimize the risk.

As companies embrace collaboration, the perception is that more is better. As Larry Page allegedly observed: “If you can run the company a bit more collaboratively, you get a better result, because you have more bandwidth and checking and balancing going on.”

The question that seems to be difficult to answer is: Are there governance measures that can be enabled by knowledge management systems to assist managers in a collaborative environment? Governments seem uncertain about the relationship between collaboration and cartelization. Management appears to recognize risks created by collaboration and confident that existing controls are satisfactory. Employees—particularly young employees—for whom Facebook is the killer app, may be the wild card. In this competitor-collaboration poker game, it may be time to “ante up.”