Friday | 9 January, 2009
CIO
10 Tips to Help Employees Collaborate
Collaboration has always been an essential part of the fabric of the Internet. E-mail, instant messaging, chat rooms, discussion groups and wikis are common collaborative elements that have matured over time
Grady Booch 03 December, 2007 13:05:58
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  • 5. Respect cultural sensitivities. Like travelling to a foreign country, be cognizant of cultural boundaries and business etiquette. For example, instant messaging is not an appropriate business communication tool in every country, and abbreviations vary by language. So what could be funny in one language could be insulting in another.

  • 6. Build relationships. Collaboration provides more means to develop relationships and nurture professional contacts. In-person communication is ideal, but point-to-point video instant messaging can be as good as a face-to-face meeting, without airplanes or jetlag.

  • 7. Watch what you say. Collaborative environments preserve information and help build audit trails, but this includes keeping all contents. The information shared should contribute to the team's goal and not embarrass anyone in a year's time.

  • 8. Collaboration does not replace professionalism. Regardless of the method we choose, standard practices of business ethics and professionalism apply. Informal posts and error-laden letters are unacceptable, whether printed on letterhead or posted in a wiki.

  • 9. Collaboration breeds mentors. Social software tools, such as blogs, tagging and virtual communities, can make it easier for people to quickly plug into a network of experts, find the information they need and work collaboratively. This helps build mentor relationships where an aspiring "apprentice" can be a silent participant in a mentor's community.

  • 10. Open standards extend collaboration. Just like the goal of the open-source community, where code is freely available to anyone to use, redistribute and make better, the use of open standards in creating a collaborative development environment opens the door to a community of goodwill and support to improve the experience.

    Many of us prefer the relationships built through face-to-face meetings and phone calls, but software and systems development is a team sport. Collaborative development environments are emerging to address the needs of the team, not just the individual, much as wikis, chat rooms and discussion groups have done for other domains. With these best practices, we can all become great collaborators in whatever domain we choose.

    Grady Booch is recognized internationally for his innovative work on software architecture and software engineering. A renowned visionary, he has devoted his life's work to improving the effectiveness of software developers worldwide. Booch served as chief scientist of Rational Software Corporation since its founding in 1981 and continues to serve in that capacity within IBM. He is one of the original authors of the Unified Modelling Language (UML) and was also one of the original developers of several of Rational's products. He has served as architect and architectural mentor for numerous complex software-intensive systems around the world in just about every domain imaginable

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