2010 Study on The State of Collaboration: 3 Key Points
The crew at AllCollaboration.com recently published the results from their early 2010 survey on the state of collaboration, which involved more than 450 participants across industries, roles and types of organizations around the globe. They packaged up the findings in a convenient array of bar and pie graphs (tip: click on the chart to enlarge to see detail) – and the results are interesting, though not entirely surprising. The official title of the study is Assessing the State of Collaboration: Return to Essentials and the findings hold true to the subtitle. 
The study covers the following ground:
- Current Practices in Collaboration
- Recent experience in Collaboration
- Viewpoint on Collaboration
- Demographic Information
And highlights 3 major take-aways:
- Complex collaboration is already a significant work activity for many people, and will only grow in importance.
- Successful collaboration requires mostly the good principles of project management applied to dispersed teams.
- Keep it simple on the collaboration tools.
The study captures a number of useful and interesting statistics related to collaboration. One that we find gratifying, if not obvious is that the overwhelmingly top rated “most important advice for someone who is about to lead a major collaborative project” was:
“Define goals, roles, timelines and deliverables clearly”
What may be most interesting of all is that across a wide-ranging population of business responders, we generally have a similarly-held view that collaboration is of high value for many reasons and in many contexts. While we don’t have all of the important best practices completely nailed down, we are committed to making progress.
Graph courtesy of AllCollaboration.com
A helpful overview of the study from All Collaboration is provided below along with some info about the group that carried out the survey. Check out the rest of the survey results by clicking here.
About the study, according to those that carried it out:
The primary objective of the study was to assess the state of collaboration among individuals and in organizations. This includes:
- expectations
- purpose and level of collaboration
- use of collaboration tools and their effectiveness
- barriers to collaboration
By collaboration, we mean working jointly with others.
Over 450 respondents participated in the survey conducted by All Collaboration in January and February 2010. Respondents came from all levels within organizations, all functional areas, a wide range of organization sizes, a wide range of industries with some concentration in consulting, and different regions although mostly North Americans. While there are some differences in emphasis, the general findings and conclusions are consistent across most of these groups.
About AllCollaboration.com, in their own words:
What do we do?
Focusing on collaboration, we offer points-of-view, original research, reviews of products and services, interviews with industry luminaries, and the “best of” articles on the web. We have a companion Discussion Group on LinkedIn.Why do we do this?
We have worked in businesses that have required us to lead diverse global teams, and understand the potential and the pitfalls of collaboration.
More detail on the guys that are behind the collaboration study can be found here – and follow them all on Twitter, too:
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