What are Collaboration Tools?

08 Jan 2021

Buzzwords have their place, but they often get in the way.

Question: What do email, Google Sheets, Slack, and in-person meetings all have in common?

Answer: They enable collaboration!

Sometimes the way we classify collaboration tools and applications is misleading. Ordinary meetings and email are the most common collaboration tools we use, but do we think of them that way?

All the word collaboration means is co-laboring or working together. It’s something people have always done. So if you have built or deployed a ‘collaboration tool,’ it’s not very useful to describe it that way. ‘Collaboration tool’ tells us very little when we define collaboration more precisely. Instead, you might say that you ‘make software that allows you to save a document in the cloud that other people can modify and annotate’ if that is what your tool happens to do. Tell us what it does. And tell us what problem it solves. Don’t worry so much about what it supposedly ‘is.’ Buyers look to solve particular problems that cause their company pain. They don’t (or shouldn’t be) thinking in universal categories or boilerplate to make a big decision.

Here are a few examples of well-known tools, applications, and platforms, stated differently:

• LinkedIn creates a valuable forum around jobs and the workplace - it helps employers and job seekers make connections.
• Github allows people to develop and share code.
• Twilio enables companies to easily interact with customers, partners, and others through SMS.
• Stack Overflow makes it possible for developers to get answers to their questions and to share domain knowledge with others.
• Twitter and Facebook allow companies to engage with and advertise to customers through their social media platforms.

Each of these tools demonstrates its value better when described in terms of what it does. It even becomes easier to see that each is ultimately about collaboration. Buzzwords can be useful, such as in an elevator pitch. But when we are trying to solve real problems, they often get in the way.