McKinsey wrote an article (“Beyond the Business Unit”, February 2001) some time back regarding what they called “lateral processes”. As a keen observer of the impact (or occasional lack thereof) technology can have on knowledge workers, I’ve wondered what benefit collaboration in an organisation can have?

“Disaggregation” or splitting up businesses into silos provides scale and devolution of control. One major challenge faced by organisations is information sharing in this new world of work. If business units are either duplicated between these silos or merely separated by geography, how can information flow? The organisational design may not have factored this into the equation. This could be best characterised as the “price of spread”.

The HR function in the US parent of a multinational organisation will have devolved HR functions in each or at least most of its subsidiaries. However, employees within that HR function in the US will need to collaborate and share information with HR employees regardless of their locations. These HR users are not technologists and will use email as the default information sharing tool. For the parent Company, having employees wander the globe with sensitive employee data on laptops or PDA’s is a potential legal nightmare. Equally, the HR employees in the US will need to author and redact documents with HR teams around the globe as employment law differs from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.

This is the kind of high level issue that collaboration technologies like SharePoint and Lotus Notes were designed to address. SharePoint is a train wreck and Notes is dead. Where to go?

If you have teams of users who need to create ad-hoc, secure file sharing workspaces, check out www.ftopia.com.

ftopia. Simply Share.