Collaboration 2.0: Technology and Best Practices for Successful Collaboration in a Web 2.0 World

My personal experience in key segments of the collaboration software market space stretches back about 25 years, pre-dating "CRM" even before it was called "sales force automation," with products such as ACT!, and later GoldMine (especially through the 90s) as they moved from desktops to networks. It was a crowded, confusing marketplace then, and it's even-more-so now. But David Coleman and Stewart Levine have taken an often brilliant stab at the interesting challenge of looking at collaboration beyond the sales force, on an organizational level, in their new book, "Collaboration 2.0: Technology and Best Practices for Successful Collaboration in a Web 2.0 World." I've read two books in the past five months that will have a direct impact on my business, my sales and my life and Collaboration 2.0 is one of those. (The other being Sales Essentials by Stephen Schiffman.) Throughout Coleman & Levine's book they deal with people, processes, and technologies that best complement each other. I believe these two authors provide a first-class overview of collaboration technologies, how they can be applied and what the best behaviors are to help make "teams" work more effectively. The authors cover a wide scope on a very fragmented and rapidly evolving technology environment and help the reader make sense of it. Although the first part of the book written by David Coleman does give a great overview of current and emerging collaboration technologies, it also ties these technologies to specific business processes measured against what they call "collaborative leverage." I think this is important in that collaboration without a specific place to apply it and without a specific goal is just software that can promote social interactions between people. But online communities, whether social or business, must meet some objective. And in the case of business users, collaborative efforts must be "dollarized." The second part of the book, written by Stewart Levine, really looks at people and processes and deals with techniques to build trust and agreement. Most of Stewart's ideas are very practical, and often can be seen as "Communication 101." The fact that Levine applies these techniques to the new collaborative environments is one of the things that make this book so essential. The final part of the book looks at how to apply the best practices of people, process and technology (for collaboration) and how to get the most from this application. The final chapter takes a somewhat "big picture" view and looks at the effects of collaboration on society, and in this case, how these collaboration technologies affect environmental sustainability. To me this book is a "must-read" for people who sell or who market products and services for a living. It shows you how to work smarter and the bottom-line benefit is that you can cut the length of the sales cycle. This is the biggest bugaboo in the game. I need deals closed today, not tomorrow. Collaboration,

With all due apologies to Mark Twain, it seems as though everybody talks about Collaboration but nobody does anything about it. Especially on the B2B side. The younger generation engages social networking technologies, and are probably in the best position to understand the principles of Collaboration. But on some level, as with previous business buzzwords such as "Quality" and "Virtual," this concept threatens to become "Collaboration" in some quarters, instead: a poor clone of a great practice. There's nothing new about collaboration, per se: corporate IT systems of the 70s and 80s ran expensive Decision Support Systems (most notably from Comshare) that eventually found their way to the PC platform, with products such as Forest & Trees. In theory, enterprise-wide collaboration is a "given." So in the 21st century, we're supposed to know how to collaborate, whether an organization operates that way (or can, or wishes to) or not. This is not to suggest that there are not, literally, hundreds of products and software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications for organizations to adopt. In point of fact, from free services to expensive products, the number of collaboration software options is mind-numbing. So David Coleman and Stewart Levine, authors of "Collaboration 2.0: Technology and Best Practices for Successful Collaboration in a Web 2.0 World" have taken on the Herculean task of looking at collaboration holistically, and throughout the book try to deal with the holy triumvirate of collaboration: people, process and technology. The first part of the book, written by Coleman, details current and emerging collaboration technologies, tying them to specific business processes exhibiting what he calls "collaborative leverage." Rather than adopt a solution in search of a problem, i.e., implement collaboration software without first identifying how and where to apply it, merely brings "social networking to the corporate enterprise. But to what effect? The second part of the book, written by Levine, closely examines the essential part of the collaboration equation - people processes - as well as techniques to build trust and agreement. Levine's approach seems almost too fundamental, but there's much to be said for simplifying this miasma of technologies, and having them make sense within distributed collaborative environments. Which makes this book a highly valuable primer. The last two chapters detail best practices of how to make viable that holy trinity of people, processes and technology within the organization overall, and how to get the greatest results from "going collaborative." In fact, the final chapter goes beyond the workplace, examining the effects of collaboration on society, even to the point of affecting environmental sustainability. Intuitively, being able to save money by not traveling to trade show or meeting XYZ is a great concept. But on the Green side, there are very telling implications. For example, the pollution g