Thomas Vander Wal writes about Getting to “we”, a paper by Peter Denning and Peter Yaholkovsky in the April 2008 Communications of the ACM that defines four areas of knowledge needs:

1. Information sharing
2. Coordination
3. Cooperation
4. Collaboration

and the tools best suited for each area. Note that Collaboration is the last of the four areas – it’s the activity that happens after the groundwork is laid by sharing information on a subject, coordinating the work around that information = project, and getting buy-in from people who will be involved in that project (cooperation). Effective collaboration happens as the last stage of this process:

…collaboration is often not the first choice of tools we should reach for, as gathering information, understanding, and working through options is really needed in order to get to the stages of agreement.

To note, the wiki – the usual darling of collaboration – is included in their “cooperation” examples and not Collaboration. Most of the tools many businesses consider in collaboration tools are in the lowest level, which is “information sharing”. But, workflow management falls into the coordination bucket.

The bottom line here is that “collaboration” is seriously overused as a buzzword. Think carefully next time you use it.