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We’ve all likely experienced the impact of social collaboration tools like LinkedIn and Facebook in our personal lives, but, chances are, few of us have seen the same kind of impact from collaboration tools in our work lives. Despite the fact that at home we can easily upload content a single time and then share via links, create discussion threads around content, and browse relevant content and conversations along a range of convenient facets, at work most of us are still using the clunky trinity of shared drives, hard drives and email to create, find and share documents.
But that’s changing, and fast. In the not too distant future (18 – 24 months), we’ll be seeing three key shifts in how we collaborate on documents in the enterprise.
#1: Some documents will no longer be documents at all
The first important shift is that we’ll stop using documents to do those things that are better accomplished with social collaboration tools, whether because the information in these documents has a short useful lifespan or because it would benefit from the fluidity that social collaboration tools provide.
The following figure plots some common corporate documents along these two axes.
As we move from lower left to upper right, the likelihood increases that over the next two years these documents will tend to fall out of use and be replaced with other modes of communication, such as microblogging, community spaces, threaded conversations, wikis and so on.
For those documents on the lower left, however, it’s much more likely that they will remain documents…at least for the foreseeable future. Their long lifespan and low degree of fluidity mean that there isn’t much to be gained by using the current generation of social tools to collaborate on them. However, given the breakneck pace of innovation we’re seeing in this space, I imagine tools will emerge in the next few years to enable more social collaboration for these kinds of documents as well.
#2: Some documents will no longer begin their lives as documents
The second important shift is that, for some documents, we’ll create them as other kinds of content (e.g., wikis, conversation threads, blogs) and then migrate them to documents at a certain point in their lifecycle (e.g., major draft versions, final published version).
The following figure expands the scope of the previous one, which plotted only final versions of documents, to include draft versions of some of these same documents.
As you can see, when we move upstream in the document lifecycle to include drafts, the range of documents that would benefit from social collaboration tools dramatically increases. This is true even though once they reach the point of being published (and therefore migrate back towards the lower left quadrant), they would need to be handled using more traditional document management tools.
(Editor's Note: You might also like: What Wikipedia Can Teach Businesses About Collaborative Authoring)
#3: Some documents will remain documents throughout their lifecycle, but how they get created and shared will change
The third important shift is that, even when we’re doing good old fashioned document management from cradle to grave on a document, we’ll begin creating and sharing that document in new ways.
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