Thanks, Becky T! I look forward to hearing of your continued success as well, and was glad you were able to make it to the "Mike is outta here" get-together. See you soon.

Glad you could join us, Michael. Your work on collaboration has influenced ours over quite some time, and we certainly learned as much today from the attendees as they did from the experiences we were able to share.

Barrie and Tom, thank you! I hope it's sufficiently clear from my post that we stand on the shoulders of giants. Lots of very talented people helped get us to where we are, and I'm thrilled to continue to work with a sizable subset of them on the other side of this transition/integration to get to the next level!

Very similar experience here, Michael. I have worked in a specific place I was able to call my own for the last 19 years, and am in the process of moving to an organization that is much more "virtual." I read this post with interest, and am interested in studies and empirical evidence in one way or the other.

Sadie, I don't think I'm trying to say that tools = collaboration. To do so would to be miss the value of the methods that we know are far more important (the old saw "90% sociology, 10% technology"). I was trying to say that tools are mostly orthogonal to collaboration (sorry, no r-squared available), and that there is no "yes/no collaboration" box, although the right tools, applied the right way, can support good collaborative processes or help dampen the effect of bad ones.

Thanks, Jack, I'm interested to see where this goes as well. I hope to catch up soon at a local KM event.

You're too kind, Larry. Thanks for all the insight you've provided over the years. I look forward to continuing to see you in the Boston KM community for a long time to come. As Dan Keldsen suggested earlier: bigger, better, bolder! :-)

Interesting post, Sadie. I'm curious about the degree to which you are insisting that collaboration needs to be synchronous vs asynchronous. In our world, it seems that the ability to get groups together in real time for the gold standard of facilitated, synchronous, (preferably) co-located collaboration is almost impossibly rare, so we often settle for asynchronous collaboration via low-latency, highly automated, create-publish-review-revise-publish-harvest cycles, given the limitations of space and time. I concur with you that there are many, many areas for improvement in tasks like harvesting lessons learned, intelligently tagging content and authors to help suss out and validate quality, etc., but I'm not ready to dismiss the tools and methods that serve as the most common level of collaboration or KM maturity as "not collaboration" given that they are orders of magnitude more effficient than the "old ways" (ad hoc, e-mail or "dumb" respositories). However, anyone with a binary "we have/don't have collaboration" worldview probably deserves more excoriation than you've delivered here. :-) Thanks for a thought-provoking post!

Christian, I totally appreciate the "high value/high leverage" play and you know how I feel about measurement, but I think there are other factors that are overlooked or at least undersold in this analysis. Availability of resources and receptiveness of users are critical success factors as well, and they are frequently inversely proportional to the degree of business-criticality of the solution. If we intend to deploy SharePoint to solve critical business problems in measurable ways, I think we need to add this dimension to our decision-making criteria. You could argue that it's already baked into ROI, but I rarely see it explicitly mentioned/discussed in a planning process or risk analysis. Frequently, when we do, what appears to be the the second- or third most urgently needed solution (e.g., HR self-service forms library) becomes a much more viable "win" because of a lack of ability of business stakeholders on the higher-leverage (automation of a new project initation process, for example, when utilization is 90% and everyone's maxed out doing their "day job"). I like your premise a lot, just wanted to add that oft-overlooked dimension...

Chris, there's no way I could adequately thank you for all that you've done for KMA and for me as a colleague and friend during our time together. We're stronger and better collectively as a result of your work here, and we look forward to seeing your success in your new role. I'm sure we'll stay connected through the SharePoint community, and wish you all the best as you embark on your new adventure.