Four Building Blocks of Collaborative Interaction
Author: David Mario Smith
Date: August 13, 2014
Topic: Collaboration
Research Note Number: 2014-33
Issue: What collaboration technologies and architectures should enterprises leverage?
Summary: Collaboration is about the interactions between people. Collaboration planners should provide easy access to the building blocks that participants use to complete their mission.
Each phase or generation of collaboration has brought new tools and techniques to enhance interactions between people and improve communication. Over the years, many of these have collided, overlapped, or distracted rather than inspired their users. When a deluge of mismatched tools is scattered throughout the enterprise with no sound strategy, the signal-to-noise ratio goes down rather than up, and communication suffers. To overcome this, enterprise collaboration strategies should focus on the core elements of communication that facilitate interaction, not the tools or technologies that provide them. This research note discusses the four building blocks that make collaboration successful.