Introducing – The Digital Collaboration Canvas
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Join For FreeThere is plenty of waste hidden in knowledge work, much of which we have
come to accept as “normal” ways of working. I am not just referring to
inefficient meetings we attend and the time we waste on managing our
email inboxes. As knowledge workers spend a lot of time on activities
such as searching for information, trying to figure out what the
colleagues are doing and when to contribute, re-creating information
that already exists somewhere else, and so on. One might say that we are
spending all this time just getting ready to work.
Although the tasks we need to perform come in all shapes and sizes, most
rely on a number of basic capabilities such as finding information or
locating expertise. The more interdependent our work becomes, the more
important these capabilities become to us. If they are weak, our ability
to collaborate and create value together as an organization becomes
crippled. Therefore improving such capabilities can both reduce a lot of
the waste in knowledge work and enable people to work smarter together.
Over the years I have developed a framework of 9 capabilities that are
important for knowledge work in general and for collaboration efforts in
particular. I use the framework to help clients understand their
current ways of working, identify problems and opportunities for
improvement, and to explore better ways of working – with digital tools.
The framework is illustrated below, inspired by a model by Harold Jarche who combined Ian McCarthy’s honeycomb of social media with an early version of my capabilities framework.
When I work with clients of various sizes and in various industries to improve digital collaboration, I use my framework and a tool that I call “The Digital Collaboration Canvas”. It includes definitions of each capability and helps you to assess and improve these capabilities within a certain context, such as project collaboration or a specific business process.
You can download The Digital Collaboration Canvas as PDF and you are free to use it under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (see details at the bottom of this post).
If you are interested in learning more about how to use my framework and The Digital Collaboration Canvas, feel free to contact me. Please feel free to suggest any improvements.

Based on a work at http://www.oscarberg.net.
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