Collaboration operations: ensuring success

Summary form only given. Collaboration services promise to improve the engagement and effectiveness of humans across geospatial, temporal, and organizational boundaries. However there also are many examples of collaboration failures. This article describes several successful deployments of state of the art collaboration environments and exemplifies and demonstrates the use of collaboration services to enhance team endeavors. We highlight both synchronous and asynchronous collaboration services such as conferencing (audio, video, text), data and application sharing, and workflow management and describe more sophisticated services including expertise location, translingual chat, and meeting transcription/summarization. We describe successful collaboration deployments in several domains including joint air operations, intelligence, and coalition operations. Operational outcomes have included dramatic effects such as a doubling the level of situational awareness, cutting in half the time to perform operations, significantly reducing forward deployed personnel, and transforming serial operations into parallel ones. Video and pictures from real world operations will highlight both enablers of and impediments to successful collaboration. This article does not evaluate or recommend any specific tools, rather report experiences and lessons learned from over a decade of experience with multiple collaboration environments in operational settings. We summarize key lessons learned and outline collaboration best practices that promise to increase the likelihood of successful collaboration. This includes efforts that address technology, process, and culture challenges that ensure successful awareness, information sharing, joint action, and, ultimately, goal alignment. We introduce a collaboration Capability Maturity Model (C-CMM) that describes key elements underlying collaboration process maturity