Barriers to Internal Collaboration

With numerous tools available, such as del.icio.us and wikis, there are still possible barriers for effective internal collaboration within organizations. The main barriers are the comfort level of staff regarding technology and the workplace atmosphere, which includes the feelings of the management toward internal collaboration tools.

While an internal collaboration tool like wikis are a perfect technology for collaborating and combining the knowledge of multiple staff members, if the staff are not comfortable working with this technology, it will not be used to its full potential. However, this could easily be remedied through tutorials or technology classes that show staff how to use wikis and how it could help them. Similarly, if staff do not want to share their knowledge with one another and prefer to be the "go-to" person for specific questions, then this would also become a barrier to sharing organizational knowledge and allowing it to be available to all.

Regarding tagging tools like del.icio.us or simply having a set bookmark list available on all reference computers, a barrier could be the lack of a set number of tags that allow for easy retrieval. Staff participation could be another barrier, as some staff members who are more comfortable with technology would submit more links while others submit none. Again, showing the staff how the tagging and bookmarking works would erase most of this barrier.

Lastly, if management does not have positive feelings towards internal collaboration tools and do not believe it is a viable use of time, there will most likely not be a positive atmosphere in the organization for staff to add their knowledge to the wiki or del.icio.us links. Staff would have to do this out of office hours in their free time which is not conducive to having the majority of the staff participate.

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Kelly, W. (2009). Corporate culture, not technology, drives internal collaboration. Retrieved from http://gigaom.com/collaboration/corporate-culture-not-technology-drives-online-collaboration/.

Wilding, G. AskNow's del.icio.us useful resources. Retrieved from http://www.nla.gov.au/pub/gateways/issues/91/story01.html.