Collaboration Platforms: Less Is More

(This blog series -- Save Money, Spend Smarter, and Get More Done -- is sponsored by HP Officejet Pro. Did you know that inkjet printers can create professional color documents at about half the cost per page of laser printers?)

When it comes to collaboration, sharing, and communications platforms in your company, there really can be too much of a good thing. No, I’m not talking about how much storage space you offer your team, but the actual number of platforms they have to use.

Here’s the deal.

Many companies set up multiple systems designed to share information and encourage collaboration. They may have shared drives on network servers, Microsoft Outlook collaboration features, company intranets and wikis, cloud based online-backups, ftp sites, and so on. And that’s all good.

Then, on top of that, workers often set up their own sharing and collaboration platforms and procedures, from personal email accounts like Gmail and Google Docs (everyone loves that 7 GB of storage space!) to the wildly popular Dropbox (and the new Dropbox for Teams) and similar products, to sneakernet solutions like thumbdrives and portable hard drives. And that’s all good, too.

Good Alternatives – Bad Problems

But when you put them all together, it turns out all those good alternatives start to cause bad problems.

Basically, the more sharing and collaboration platforms you make available, the more places people have to go to look for the information or documents or help they need.  Too often, what they’re looking for isn’t on the particular platform on which they’re looking, so the effort either takes longer than it should, or the searcher gives up before finding what they’re looking for.

Plus, the more platforms you have to use, the steeper the learning curve for each one -- especially the ones you don’t use regularly. Not to mention the hassles of managing multiple sets of log-ins and passwords.

Sometimes, people -- and companies -- try to solve these problems by storing and sharing important information in multiple places. That way they -- and others -- can find it no matter where they look, without having to remember whether it’s on the ftp server or in the Dropbox. (I have to admit that I’m often guilty of this, and I bet many of you are, too.)

Of course, that inevitably leads to potentially dangerous version-control and updating inconsistencies, not to mention wasting time, storage space, and computing resources.

When Less Is More

Perhaps intuitively, the fewer platforms available, the more likely that people will actually use them to share and store information, the more likely that people will look there when they need something, and the more likely they will find what they’re looking for.

That’s true even if the platforms you use don't offer some fancy new features that seem like they would be very valuable to your company.

If you sincerely want your team to use the sharing and storage platforms as efficiently as possible, there are a few things you can do:

• Limit the number of sharing and collaboration platforms as much as possible. Don’t use systems with overlapping capabilities. Try to find a single solution for all your needs.
• Create clear policies for what kinds of information goes where. No one should be confused about where to put or where to look for particular types of documents or messages. Make sure the chosen platform works well and is up-to-date, and then do not support alternatives.
• Make essential information available ONLY on the preferred platform(s). That includes important announcements, HR forms, expense reports, and other high-value business data. That way, everyone will have to log into the platform occasionally and learn how to use it.
• Use collaboration platforms for fun stuff, too. Let employees share recipes and restaurant recommendations, organize sports and contests, and coordinate volunteer work on your preferred platform. That builds confidence and expertise, as well as positive feelings about the platform.
• Enforce single-sign-on for all your company’s systems. At least that will make password management a lot simpler for your employees.
• Be sure YOU use it, too. If you’re the boss and you’re not eating the company dog food, employees will quickly notice -- and decide they can ignore it, too.