I was bemoaning the lack of collaborative tools in one of my clients. The recent impact of the economic crisis has downsized the company and the job cuts has gone to an extent where critical skills and knowledge has been lost.
In a recent exercise, an interface to a manufacturing subsystem has to be modified as a machine has to be allowed for the interface. It just so happens that the same machine type has been used in other sites and for a slightly different manner. No available documentation pointed to the business rules. With the help of business colleagues, it took me 2 days to understand the dilemma and the exercise to manage the change has not yet been completed to date.
In this particular case, there was sufficient skill left to piece together a good-enough picture. But there are other areas that are not so lucky.
I was thinking perhaps if the company had a library of wikis and blogs, the effort would not be so hard. Collaboration tools has been in the market for a while....Sharepoint comes to mind (See Sharepoint and Enterprise 2.0: The good, the bad, and the ugly by D.Hinchcliffe).
Australian firms value the nature of human capital as evidenced by emphasis on HR and Talent Management Systems. It is a far bigger challenge to change the culture of firms to take advantage of collaborative systems so that they capture the value in complex relationships and highly unstructured information.
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