Doing things backwards

More times than I care to remember I have encountered collaborative technology that actually hinders collaboration and knowledge sharing.  Why?  Well I think David Coleman of Collaborative Strategies hits the reason in his post about how some of the least collaborative people in an organization are often the ones picking the technology.

It isn't that IT doesn't know what they are doing (when it comes to collaboration), but that they sometimes become disconnected from the people that could benefit most from their leadership.  Having a simple conversation with people about how they would like to use technology and then helping them understand what is available and then implementing unstructured pilots can help everyone understand the value proposition.  Of course there are extremes where no one does anything about collaboration tools because of a fear of failure or making things over complicated.

Collaboration isn't rocket science, we do it everyday.  When it comes to technology to collaborate we need to stop over thinking things and use simple methods and tools.