Why try to collaborate?

As mentioned in About, I work in higher education, which can be (at least somewhat) justifiably described as highly decentralized when it comes to both business processes and technology service delivery. Efforts to coordinate or centralize either meet with challenges as well-intentioned working groups attempt to reconcile the many disparities among distributed units' processes and practices that have organically grown over several (or many) years. The results can include efforts that start but don't go anywhere, endless meetings about the same conversation, and relatively little change from the end-user's viewpoint.

Sounds pretty grim, right?

Despite the dour description, positive outcomes do arise from all these attempts at collaboration.

1. People get to know one another. Sounds obvious, but in a large (or even) small organization that has multiple silos of information and process, this is not necessarily the case. I have been in any number of meetings where people who should know each other don't. If we can't get this done, it's that much more difficult to get anything else done.
2. People start getting comfortable with the value and costs of collaboration. Again, obvious. But it's much easier to be effective in one's own sphere than to be part of reaching across barriers and making something happen in a larger context.
3. The first two enable repeat attempts to share and collaborate. Even if a particular attempt fails to bear fruit, the relationships and increased comfort level allows the parties to say, "Maybe next time we'll have the right problem to solve/opportunity to succeed."

In technology, the need to collaborate and share is especially important, verging on critical to success. Pressures to compete with great user experiences in the consumer world, keep up with exploding demand, and enable people to seamlessly cross information silos require IT not as a set of discrete systems and services, but as an ecosystem of loosely coupled (and often interacting) applications and data. Getting in the same room isn't the solution, but it's a start.