Perspectives: How CMS Fits in an Enterprise Collaboration Environment

By Jed Cawthorne (@jedpc) Aug 5, 2010

After exploring how content management systems fit into the Knowledge Management ecosystem, let's have a look at how to approach enterprise collaboration when thinking about a new Web CMS or Enterprise CMS implementation, or vice versa.

How Do You Define Collaboration?

Now, I don’t claim to be an expert on collaboration per se, but I do have some colleagues who are — most notably Michael Sampson. He is the author of numerous excellent books on the subject. Michael has previously given constructive criticism on my collaboration model, suggesting it's too technical or system centric. I agree, it might be, but in the context of this article, that fits our purposes well I think.

Todays' definition of collaboration is fundamentally being social.

[Editor's Note: Also see: Enterprise Collaboration: It's About the Culture, Stupid]

AIIM defines collaboration as:

Collaboration is a working practice whereby individuals work together to a common purpose to achieve business benefit.

OK, so it requires a bunch of us to be working together towards common goals, I think most of us probably grasped the basic concept. However, this is different from communication, for example, which is more about the process of transferring information from one person, or point, to another.

Communications can of course be part of collaborative working, and this brings us to a couple more definitions that also apply to collaboration systems:

Synchronous communications

A phone conversation is a type of synchronous communication. Both parties are taking part in the conversation at the same time, or it would not make sense. Instant messaging is also an example of synchronous communication.

Asynchronous communications

Email is a good example of asynchronous communications, a message is sent at some point in time and the recipient responds at a later time as required. Also, think enterprise microblogging, microsharing and workspaces.

So when we are thinking about content management systems and how they fit into your collaboration strategy, perhaps the first thing to think about is whether you need:

an integration with synchronous collaboration technologies
or, at least, a link to synchronous collaboration technologies, such as desktop video conferencing
or the ability to send a document from your repository to a colleague via an instant messaging chat session.

Spinning that on its head, do you need your CMS to be able to store recorded video conferencing sessions for easy access at later date?

Most CMSs have an integration with email in one form or another for taking care of the asynchronous communications scenarios.

‘Technical’ Collaboration Scenarios

Successful collaboration normally requires a focus on non-technical aspects — people and context, process and objectives (and content!). However, when considering collaboration from a systems perspective, it is also useful to consider the particular focus of the collaborative working scenario: