A Taxonomy of Collaboration Tools
19 April 2010 Tweet Before we offer our Taxonomy of Collaboration Tools, we address such questions as: Why do we need a taxonomy of collaboration tools? How does the taxonomy help? How do we use the taxonomy? And, so on.
Simply put, taxonomy provides order and structure to chaos in the jungle of collaboration tools. As we know, hundreds if not thousands of collaboration tools are available. It seems a new collaboration tool is announced every few weeks, let alone the multitude of upgrades for existing tools. Enormous number of tools certainly does not help appropriate tool selection for collaboration, based on the context on hand. This is where taxonomy comes to the rescue.
Our taxonomy is based on the user-needs for effective collaboration. In an earlier post, we discussed that Collaboration Is About People, Not Technology. Additionally, our 4 Ps Model for Effective Collaboration - Purpose, People, Process and Place - outlines why tools selection must be based on the project goals, people interaction and dynamic, and collaboration processes.
Our approach to taxonomy allows for more effective selection of tools based on people and project needs. Sometimes we need to start slow to finish fast, and such is the case for collaboration. It is instructive to identify the needs for tools before selecting them. The amount of effort and time put into selecting tools that would be effective – that is, the selected tools perform as intended and people actually use them for intended purposes - pays off handsomely, instead of using the same set of tools regardless of the context and needs. Having identified the needs, taxonomy is used to select the tools.
The All Collaboration Taxonomy of Collaboration Tools
We identify four categories of user-needs for effective collaboration: Communication, Organization, Writing/Editing, and Engaging/Networking. Each category has various types of tools, which we shall outline below with illustrative example.
Communication:
- Audio conferencing (VoIP); e.g., Skype, YIM, Windows Live, AIM, and GTalk
- Video Conferencing; e.g., Skype, YIM, Windows Live, AIM, and GTalk
- Whiteboarding; e.g., Dabbleboard, Skrbl, Vyew, and GE ImaginationCubed
- Web Conferencing; e.g., WebEx, GoToMeeting, Elluminate, and Fuze Meeting
- Instant Messaging (IM); e.g., Skype, YIM, Windows Live, AIM, and GTalk
- Discussion Forums
Organization:
- File Sharing; e.g., box.net, Dropbox, SharePoint
- Project Planning; e.g., Mavenlink
- Group Calendaring/Event Scheduling; e.g., Google Calendar, Yahoo Calendar, eventbrite, and Schedgit
- Project Management; e.g., BaseCamp, OneHub, and Daptiv
Writing/Editing:
- Wikis; e.g., Comindwork, PBWorks, WetPaint, wikidot, and mediawiki
- All Things “Google”; e.g., Google Docs, Google Wave, Google Sites
Engaging/Networking:
- Public Sites; e.g., LinkedIn, and Facebook
- Blogging: WordPress
- Microblogging: Twitter, Yammer, Chatter
More often than not, tools tend to span more than one sub-category or category. And then there is the age-old question of whether one should select the best of breed or suite. What is your approach?
Which collaboration tools do you use? How effective are they? What would you recommend? You will find our survey findings - Keep it simple on collaboration tools - quite insightful in this regard.
Lokesh Datta
Reader Comments (4)
If it were me, I would choose a suite of tools. I'd need to have everything - communication, organization, writing and networking - all in one place. There are options out there that bring all this together nicely, which is excellent for those businesses who think like I do and want everything together in one place.
Insightful article. The taxonomy you provide indeed does clearly help lay out what collaboration tools exist in the market. But most of the "collaboration suites" out there do combine these tools in all sorts of permutations and combination, making it hard for customers to sift through them. And more, the latest trend is for collaboration suites to include almost all of these tools in an integrated suite, and include messaging tools as well. For example Google Apps , HyperOffice Collaboration Suite, Microsoft BPOS.
Would you add B2B(Business to business) collaboration to the taxonomy? B2B collaboration includes customer-supplier networks sharing their supply chain plans, demand-inventory-capacity-order status, product structure, etc?
Examples such as Information Builders iWay; SAP Supply Network Collaboration; Kinaxis, I2, etc?
I posted this question on LinkedIn: Would you choose the best of breed or suite approach to selecting collaboration tools? How much does the context influence your decision?
I received interesting responses that I would like to share.
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Larry Kutcher, Chief Operating Officer at Cognition Technologies, Inc.
It depends on the breadth of tools the organization is seeking to implement. If there are several, then integration is key and typically the decision will go to the most well-rounded suite. If there is only a specific focus, then perhaps best of breed, if it is widely supported and interfaces with other business tools used.
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Daniel Barnett, www.WORKetc.com - CRM+Projects+Billing
My product is an "all-in-one" approach to small business management. CRM + Billing + Project Management and more. WORKetc @ www.WORKetc.com
What we are finding (and this trend is only just gathering momentum) is that customers are turning away from single-solution software. The cost of owning multiple tools, switching between interfaces, and then running integration options quickly becomes overwhelming for business, particularly small business.
Small business owners need to be focussed on running their business, not on integrating multiple, disparate software tools.
See: http://www.WORKetc.com, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvfVUrKLUXs
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Jeff Cooper, IT Infrastructure Manager at Abbott Vascular Devices
First off, kudos on the taxonomy article - very good representation of the types of tools out there.
I lean toward the "suite" approach. Ideally, while the suite approach may not offer the best in each product, it offers the best interoperability and management of a set of products.
For example, love them or hate them, Microsoft offers good interoperability across many of its collaborative products. For example, "user presence" is available to most Office products based on your calendar maintained in Exchange. That includes Email, Instant Messaging, SharePoint, etc. If you were to mix products- say some other email solution- and these other Microsoft Office tools, then you would either have to do without presence or integrate another vendor solution. Then if you used a third-party product for presence, you now have to be concerned over interoperability of patching, versioning, etc as the two products change independent of each other.
So while it may never be appropriate to go "all in" on any single vendor, I would recommend to try to standardize on 2 or 3 key vendors with the highest probability of interoperability.
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Wallace Jackson, Multimedia Producer and i3D Programmer for Acrobat 3D PDF, JavaFX, Mobile & Virtual Worlds
Suggest looking at the open source solutions at SourceForge.Net ;)
See: http://www.sourceforge.net
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Pankaj Taneja, Business Dev. Exec. at Second Foundation
The following article I did provides another interesting conceptualization of "collaboration tools" in the market. The conceptualization is based on solution structure more than collaboration feature set.
See: http://www.ebizq.net/topics/saas/features/11873.html
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Nkateko Okwera, Project Manager at ICF Macro
I prefer suites. My main motivator is the idea of seamless integration between multiple platforms to meet business needs. You also won’t want to have varying levels of integration based on what you are using. The down-side to selecting a suite is that you have to live with the limitations of that suite.
I’m pretty much a SharePoint user who loves many things about it but also recognizes the shortcomings of the platform. That being said, a good suite is one that is flexible and allows for customization without losing the core functionality of the suite. SharePoint out of the box doesn’t blow you away, but toss in the ability to build your own web parts, integrate it into other .NET solutions, and the ability to customize its core behaviors, and you have a solid platform. I’ve been itching to try this suite : SharePoint MOSS, Office Communication Server, Office 2007 for an integrated online business collaboration environment.
When I think of an integrated experience, I think of team members being able to review their tasks from inside of a word document. Colleagues simultaneously working on the same resources and getting instant notifications no matter what application they are using. What about online chat that also reports your online status across the entire suite? What about your email client being a window to your collaboration areas? These are just a few ideas around what I think a suite should provide – but I do feel like without starting with common platforms, you won’t be able to piecemeal that kind of functionality.