Providing on-line & In-person, immersive , collaborative team experiences

The accelerating acceptance of electronic collaboration technologies in organizations large and small has highlighted the need to more efficiently and holistically evaluate available solutions in a real-world environment. No longer is it enough to see a demo on a table top at a tradeshow to understand the technology, how it enables the team interactions, the interpersonal interactions of team members and which tools work best for which teams.

Collaboratory's mission is to provide role-play scenarios for teams, that reflect real-world situations, allowing teams to interact with the tools and each other, to help them understand not only the features and functions of the thousands of collaborative tools available, but how these tools work with critical business processes and how they support interpersonal interactions.

Why Role-Playing Scenarios?

As most learning experts agree, there is no substitute for hands-on experience. And while traditional "demos" can give a sense of how a solution will work, the closer you can design that demo to emulate team activities, the more valuable the results you derive.

Only Collaboratory provides actual hands-on interaction with a group of SaaS (Software as a Service)-based collaboration tools which are woven into a custom scenario for your group, team or organization. These scenarios give teams an opportunity to do in-depth, objective comparisons on a "level playing field" of not only these new Web 2.0 technologies but to also look at some of the soft stuff (attitudes, learning, assumptions, resistance to change, leadership skills, etc.) that is often the critical aspect between success and failure in any collaborative initiative.

Stand Alone or Part of an Engagement

An engagement (called the Business Transformation Game) has been used in the past with Collaborative Strategies clients like: Beckman Instruments, General Dynamics, PacifiCare, etc.) to help them understand collaborative technologies and how they can best implement these technologies successfully (people, process and technology). Some of these experiences have been written up in David Coleman’s new Book “Collaboration 2.0”.

Collaboratory, today is performed in a wireless environment with one or more teams, with team members either in-person, remote, or mixed teams of both. Collaboratory is being done as an experiment for the first time at the Office 2.0 Conference in San Francisco on September 3 as part of the UnConference.

The Collaboratory experience is part of an overall engagement being offered by Collaborative Strategies to help address the need of businesses and organizations to successfully use these new Web 2.0 collaboration tools for the enterprise. The Collaboratory experience can be done as a stand-alone event, or Step 3 of the overall Collaboration 2.0 Strategy engagement:

Step 1 is an initial C-level meeting for education and understanding of business goals and initiatives

Step 2 is an assessment of the organization around Collaboration (technology, culture, economics and politics (TECP)

Step 3 is the Collaboratory experience

Step 4 is identification of metrics, champions and pilot environments

Step 5 is the rapid rollout of these technologies (with IT approval) to the organization

Collaboratory will be offered again to the public in an expanded fashion in the Spring of 2009 in a full day event sponsored by E-Learning Magazine.

Come back to this site for more up to date information on this upcoming event.