I REMEMBER that collaboration used to be a bad word, for example as it pertained to collaboration with the enemy.
However, that has now changed, since collaboration is now a good word, as it now pertains to cooperation or working together.
As a matter of fact, there are software products now that are specifically developed for workgroup computing, now also known as collaborative software or groupware. Perhaps the original intention was to help people with common tasks to achieve their group goals.
As it is happening now however, collaborative software is now used by many people across many parts of an organization, not necessarily to meet common group goals, but several distinct goals that all add up anyway to the same general objectives.
In a manner of speaking, email clients and mail groups such as the ones provided by Yahoo and Google could already be classified as collaborative software, as well as the social networking sites (SNS) provided by Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, among others.
To a large extent, it could be said that the private sector has succeeded in using email and SNS for corporate collaboration, but the public sector is clearly lagging behind. This is also the case in proprietary software such as Lotus Notes and Share Point. I had the opportunity to observe the implementation of Lotus Notes in government, but without much success. I am now observing the implementation of Share Point, and it seems that success has yet to come.
Long before collaborative software came along, turf wars have already been prevalent in public sector organizations, and because of that, there was very limited sharing of information between and among departments.
Of course, it could be said that these departments would have used landlines to engage each other in voice communications, but using that option, there was hardly any way to keep records and to track the progress of collaborative work.
Long before email clients came along, Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) were already being used by some public sector organizations, but with very limited collaborative results. It seems that the bottom line of the failure is the difficulties on the part of the users to get used to the systems.
After so many years of experience in implementing software programs in private sector organizations, I have arrived at the conclusion that more often than not, the problem lies in the unwillingness of the users to use the system, rather than the software itself.
I have also arrived at the conclusion that aside from the implementation of the software programs itself, there has to be an accompanying change management program. The former would address knowledge problems; the latter would address behavioural problems. In the private sector, those who refuse to learn and use would get fired. In the public sector however, there has to be more handholding, so to speak.
There are many ways of implementing collaborative software but as I see it, there has to be a complete suite of programs, and not just one solitary program. Aside from that, the implementation plan has to include all the major trends in computing, such as the internet cloud, the Internet of Things (IOT), Big Data, data analytics, Business Intelligence (BI) and mobile integration.
As more and more users are shifting to mobile computing, no collaboration program would ever succeed without a mobile component. Although these modern trends might appear to be independent of each other, these are actually part of a whole ecosystem of solutions, with the internet cloud at the center of it.
If I were to design a complete collaborative software ecosystem, I will host it in the internet cloud, but with a backup in an in-premise facility. I will then make sure that my IOT infrastructure will be able to feed data to it.
By doing that, and by also collecting from all my other data sources, I will be able to build my Big Data infrastructure. With Big Data in place, I will then be able to do my data analytics, and because of that, I will be able to feed processed data into my BI infrastructure, thus also enabling me to deploy a Data Dashboard (DD) for the use of my clients or principals. In between all these, I will also install a Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) software, the later also able to feed my DD.
Just as it is said that beauty is in the eyes of the beholder, it could also be said that the appreciation of information, being simply just processed data, really depends on the users, from the lowest employee to the highest official.
Some might say that what is good enough is good enough and what is not broken need not be fixed, but in the final analysis, what matters most is not what is good enough for the users, but what is best for the customers or taxpayers. The cost of doing business is also important, because directly or indirectly, these costs are also being borne by the customers or taxpayers.
Some users might just remain happy by doing their paper transactions or by using stand-alone spreadsheets, but should they not focus instead on how to make their customers and taxpayers happier?/PN
