I've just completed the text of a report that assesses the benefits of upgrading from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010, which will be published by the Intranet Benchmark Forum in a month or so. There is a section in the report on intranets and collaboration, because I am increasingly concerned about organisations that take the view that there is not enough collaboration taking place and make this the justification to invest in SharePoint. Both Michael Sampson and Morten Hansen have devoted a huge amount of effort to making sense of collaboration and team work but sometimes I find there is a need to put something short and concise before the project team in a client to get the message across that effective collaboration needs more than just a piece of technology.

In such circumstances I find that articles from the Harvard Business Review are ideal, as they are always well written by authors who are global leaders in their areas of expertise. It is also difficult for senior managers to dismiss a paper in HBR as not being well researched. Global intranets can create global problems, and the paper by Jeanne Brett, Kristin Behfar and Mary Kern on Managing Multicultural Teams (November 2006 pp84-91) highlights some of the issues that need to be considered. In Ways to Build Collaborative Teams (November 2007 pp101-109) Lynda Gratton and Tamara J. Erickson report on a major survey of collaboration practice and come up with eight success factors and the concept of complex collaboration. Storytelling can be a valuable way of developing good practice. The technique came to prominence in the work of Steve Denning at the World Bank, and has been further developed by Sparknow. Peter Guber provides a good introduction to the technique in The Four Truths of the Storyteller (December 2007 pp53-59).

The concept of the learning organisation was catalysed by the book The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge. David A. Garvin, Amy C. Edmonson and Francesca Gino ask Is Yours a Learning Organisation? (March 2008 pp109-116). I have referred already to the work of Morten T. Hansen, which the author summarises in When Internal Collaboration is Bad for Your Company (April 2009 pp83-88). Yes, Collaboration can be a Bad Thing! Diane Coutu explores some of the reasons Why Teams Don't Work (May 2009 pp99-105). The most recent of these excellent articles is by Richard McDermott and Douglas Archibald on Harnessing Your Staff's Informal Networks (March 2010 pp83-89).

All these articles can be downloaded from the HBR site for $6.50, but that does not mean you can make multiple copies to circulate around the organisation either in print or electronic formats! 

Martin White