First steps is to determine whether your company is ready for collaboration. Does the corporate culture already encourage information sharing and working across teams and departments, or are business units silos in which people tend to work individually and secretively? This question should be answered at the beginning of any collaboration project to reveal where an organization currently resides on the collaborative spectrum.
“If you have a culture where people are rewarded for hoarding information and being experts without sharing, you’re not ready,” said Carol Rozwell, an analyst at Gartner Inc. in Stamford, Conn. Technology will not make an organization collaborative if it does not already support the notion of teams from different business units working in concert on common projects, Rozwell added.