Five Principles that Drive Successful Collaboration

What's behind our ability to drive results from collaboration? It's our fanatical adherence to a set of principles that have proven to drive enterprise-wide adoption and propel our customers well beyond the critical mass required to deliver meaningful outcomes.

Begin with outcomes in mind

The flat-out failure of many "build it and they will come" approaches have caught many companies by surprise. We're not surprised. Successful, sustainable collaborative efforts must be designed to produce real business outcomes from their inception.

Deliver a user experience everyone will love

The most popular consumer services on the Internet are intuitive, have almost no learning curve, and consistently deliver value from the minute they are first used. Enterprise collaboration is no exception. If people do not love the experience offered by a collaboration platform, they will not use it.

Create pointers to people

The real value of collaboration is not so much connecting people to content, but connecting people to each other in new ways. Talent is scattered across every organization — businesses make better decisions and move faster when the right people are brought together at the point they are needed.

Go where the people are

Because collaboration is largely a voluntary effort, getting them to go someplace new can be a challenge. Collaboration is most successful when it is a part of the workflow required to perform someone's job.

Actively manage collaborative activity

Scattered pockets of collaboration — provided by diverse applications and vendors — increase complexity and are difficult to monitor. Centralizing the management of collaborative activity provides a single point of security, activity aggregation, compliance monitoring and analytics.