Users Demands for Collaboration Tools
We recently asked a number of business users what they require from collaboration tools within the company. The scope reached from communication tools, documents sharing, collaboration in teams, social networking and a personalized portal. The survey should some interesting results I would like to share:
- tools for mobile phones, especially for instant messaging, would be well appreciated; this supports travelling managers on the one hand and also blue-collar working without computer
- half of the people we asked would require at least once per week to have offline access to the provided tools
- the intranet would be attractive if it provides a personalized interface that provides updates from their social network, and information from their e-mail and calendar
- social networking within the company should focus on professional information and activities, e.g. documents they share, projects people work on, etc.
- Crucial for the acceptance of new collaboration tools are the attractiveness and user-friendliness of the tool, support of local languages; further barriers due the behaviour of people should be managed
- In the current environment, 27% of the people estimate that they spend two hours or more per week in finding the right information and the right people
We are looking at a number of collaboration tools to replace our existing ageing environment; and my opinion got confirmed that the technology itself is not the game changing ingredient. In my view, it is far more important to give clear guidelines to the users how to use which tools in specific situations. And these new behaviours should be established with some activities that are fun and rewarding. In the end, the users should draw a benefit from collaboration tools and should be able to accomplish their work faster, more accurate and better informed.
What is your experience on how to make people use collaboration tools?
2 Comments so far
- Tim
Hi Yvonne,
Thank you for your comment. I totally agree to your comment. I think that goes along with ‘user-friendliness’... Several tools will only confuse the user. One of our subsidiaries has introduced three new tools for very similar things; this just doesn’t work. Even the project manager had difficulties to explain how to distinguish. Simplify is definitely the way to go.
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Hi Tim, thanks for sharing. Another point is to simplify the usage of tools. Find out what users and org need. Where possible, instead of introducing several tools to an org platform, consider streamlining or use say, 1 tool to meet several objectives. Recently, we tried using only 1 tool and removed several other tools to keep a new platform simple for our users. Still in beta stage. So far, so good. It minimises confusion to users on when to use which tool. Simon has his own share of experience in introducing several tools to users and confusion kicks in for users.
Posted on September 26, 2011 at 01:40 PM | Comment permalink