Teamrooms: Tapping the Collaborative Learning Advantage
Teamrooms as a class of Web collaboration tools are taking hold in corporations, but will they live up to their promise? This article deals with the change and adoption issues around teamrooms, covering such topics as usability, group behavior, corporate structures, leadership, and innovation. Several design and training considerations that support successful adoption of teamrooms are offered.
While leading a seminar on collaboration and learning at a large pharmaceuticals firm recently, I asked the attendees whether teamrooms—Web collaboration spaces with threaded discussion, document management, task scheduling, and other features—were commonly used in the organization. The answer? "We have them but nobody uses them." When I checked this response with other clients, they echoed this same observation: "It's like a ghost town"; "It's a dead space"; "It fell into disuse." These responses were surprising, given the promise of teamrooms as collaborative spaces that can support informal learning, knowledge exchange, and deepened personal networks. I set out to explore teamroom adoption and use in more detail.
First, a little background: Teamrooms are Internet-based collaborative tools that enable a team or network of people to communicate by posting messages and documents that can be accessed at any time from any place. Teamrooms host a whole suite of features, including threaded discussion, shared documents, chat, Web conferencing, calendars, whiteboards, application sharing, and project management tools. Leading providers of teamrooms, including IBM/Lotus, Instinctive, ERoom, Webcrossing, Crossdraw, Caucus, Intraspect, OpenText, and others, have seen a strong uptick in interest and installations since 1998. The Web collaboration market is projected to grow from $700 to $1.5B by 2003, according to Collaborative Strategies, a California-based consulting firm. Teamroom technology has stabilized and designs have gotten increasingly user-friendly. All indications are that teamrooms have the potential to be a central strategic support for successful teams.
Returning to the question of the under-utilization of these tools: There is a surprising level of agreement among managers that the issue is not about finding the ultimate best tool, it's about changing behavior. How do we get people to change their habits, specifically to treat the teamroom as a support for accomplishing projects and sharing team information? Let's have a look at some approaches for building participation in teamrooms, and in the process explore our assumptions about change, innovation, and technology.
Motivation for Change
Our received wisdom on change tells us that there is a basic human need for stability, and that our motivation for change usually is prompted by crisis. That crisis could be a competitive threat, a loss of profit, or a threshold of frustration and inefficiency. How does this relate to teamrooms? In most organizations, while the "new ways of working," such as e-business or supply chain integration, are taking root, we have still been able to make those new ways work with existing technology, such as face-to-face meetings, phone, email, fax, and the corporate intranet. However, we are rapidly reaching the crisis point with existing technologies (see The Email Crisis, below) that will force us to take seriously the new capabilities teamrooms offer us. While many organizations are working on programs to make existing technologies more efficient, it will be to our advantage to recognize that there are limits to the standard set of distance communication tools on hand. Leading companies recognize the need for a combination strategy: streamlining the use of existing technologies, such as phone and email, while spreading the word on newer technologies that may resolve some of the limitations old technologies exhibit.
Teamrooms and Innovation
Teamrooms are a central support for knowledge management in the organization, but beyond merely organizing and providing access to existing knowledge, they can act as engines of innovation and learning. Everett Rogers, author of the acclaimed Diffusion of Innovations, identifies the following attributes for successful practice adoption:
- High perceived relative advantage: This is necessary for users to replace their current practice with a new one or to alter their existing practice.
- High compatibility with the user's current practices
- Low complexity: The easier it is to understand and use, the more likely it will be adopted.
- Trialibility: The ability to test the practice before adopting it will lead to better chance of adoption.
- Observability: The more visible and immediate the results of the practice, the more likely it will be adopted.
