Collaboration software continues to race along on its unofficial mission to replace the old water cooler in the office. In a Forrester Research report on “The State of Collaboration Software Implementations: 2011,” 46 percent of the 2,403 IT executives and technology decision-makers surveyed said they are investing in or expanding team workspace investments.

But there is a familiar complaint popping up already: Companies struggle to quantify the business benefits of collaboration software investments.

While there has been an increase over time in the sophistication of use cases—with those project leaders defining areas and people they would like to help be more collaborative—the rigor in defining them has been spotty at best, according to TJ Keitt, Forrester senior analyst and the report’s author. He says that it’s typical to hear stories where collaboration technology investments start with some kind of vague notion of being more, well, collaborative.

He and his team have written more than a couple of reports to drive home the point that planning and understanding the people issues are just as important to a successful collaborative strategy as picking the technology, he says.

For this report, Forrester tracked 12 benefits of using collaboration technologies (which include team workspaces, Web 2.0 tools, messaging, conferencing and email technologies). Of those surveyed, 64 percent reported that they received from zero to four work-related benefits from using the technologies —with 11 percent reporting they received no benefits or don’t have the means to measure them.

The major benefits: Reducing travel costs, improving corporate communication and improving project management. The laggard benefits include reducing facilities cost, improving innovation and lowering cycle time/time to market for new products.

Keitt offers a few suggestions to ensure that investments in collaboration tools achieve business value.

“These technologies aren’t a hammer, and not everything is a nail,” he says. Think about the problems first that the business is trying to solve—then think about the technology.

For instance, one of the first use cases of SAP’s StreamWork software—SAP’s team workspace—was to come up with the name “StreamWork,” according to Holly Simmons, senior director of marketing in cloud, collaboration and analytics technologies at SAP. It was originally named 12Sprints, paying homage to the agile development process used to create it.

Once the use case is in place, adoption then becomes the challenge. Champions need to decide whether to motivate the workforce with the proverbial carrot or stick. For instance, executives or line of business managers could explain that the only way they’ll look at documents is if they’re loaded to the shared or the team space.

Managers following a softer approach could include incentives on people’s goals to drive them, or get them to drive their reports, to the sites. For instance: Substitute the workspace for the intranet site when directing people where to find information about their 401k or other HR-related benefits.

Sherryanne Meyer, manager of IT HR Solutions and Delivery Group at Air Products and new member of the ASUG Board of Directors, uses StreamWork to help manage the group of HCM volunteers she helps lead within ASUG.

A benefit of StreamWork is that it allows the volunteers in the HCM community to collaborate with people outside of the company and the organization, share documents and lock them down. Plus, a version with limited storage is free for anyone.

“Unlike SharePoint, which becomes a big file repository, this lets you hone in on a decision point,” Meyer says of SAP’s collaboration platform, which will soon integrate with more business suite software. “It’s just a really easy tool to throw stuff out there for people to use.”

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