The real Collaboration Challenge: Get your Employees interested. And give them a Hand … After all

Great article by Paul Rubens on Computerworld Malaysia with a lot of truth: The real challenge is to get your employees adopting your solution (whatever it is): „G2 Crowd found that only four platforms could regularly boast adoption rates above 75 percent, and no product achieved 100 percent adoption.“

Companies are going to invest in new collaboration solutions – new tools like Slack, Microsoft Teams, IBM Watson Workspace are in the market or will be very soon -, but „no employees need access to team collaboration software to get their jobs done.“ I do not agree 100 percent. Collaboration is essential for a lot of jobs. Take Marketing as an example. But it is not about tools: A lot of companies just replicate „email overload problem version 2“ in tools like Hipchat or Slack. The overload problem has just been moved to a new platform. Even worse: Overload in each Collaboration tool at the same time.

And there is another as important aspect: People stick to the way they have done the job, although the new tools would make life much easier. Why are so many people still sending email attachments instead of sharing files? Old habits die hard. So how can we approach – by intention I do not write solve – the Collaboration challenge. It is a mixture of different tactics:

Training & explaining – Never give up and show the individual benefits.

Easy usage – Make the usage of the tools easier. People may only need 5 to 10 percent of the functionality to get their job done.

And we simply can not solve the information overload and filtering problem without help, without help of artificial intelligence. We need Cognitive systems for the business helping the employees to get their job done more efficient while protecting the companies knowledge graph and taking care of data privacy.