Are collaboration tools helping or hurting an organization?

I think it depends. If your org uses the tools to help connect people across time zones and/or improve processes and communication then I think they help. If the tools begin to replace face to face interaction and become a replacement for culture then I think they can hurt. It all depends on the priorities of your organization and how strong your culture is.

It is common in most companies for an engineer to be interrupted at the cusp of greatness by a seemingly benign notification from one of the many collaboration tools. This is akin to an athlete's training being interrupted every 5 minutes to have a sugary drink. The proliferation of chat, document sharing, Q&A and other collaboration software has resulted in a connected but distracted workforce, one that has lower attention span than Goldfish. Studies estimate that it takes 30 minutes to enter a zone of peak concentration where great work can be produced. By enabling an interrupt driven ecosystem, we are preventing people from reaching and staying in their peak performance zone. The addiction to devices and busyness has also resulted in a workforce that never rests. I fondly remember the days when I could only check email from work. So, when I left work, I left work. In contrast, the modern employee is more attached to his device than a baby to a binkie. It is no surprise that two of the biggest sources of workplace stress in 2017 were workload and melding of work and personal life. In addition to spreading the viruses of distracted hyperconnectedness and busyness, the current ecosystem of collaboration tools has fragmented the knowledge base of the company. Organizational knowledge is splintered across email, chat, wikis, code repositories and document collaboration tools. Search across these tools is a neglected area and hence discovery across these tools is now a hard problem. Ironically, due to the consumerization of IT, CIOs have become spectators to the avalanche of tools that enter an organization. To return organizations to greatness, CIOs have to take charge and lead a battle of software elimination. For last 20 years, CIOs pondered how introduction of new software will increase productivity. For the next decade, they should focus on how they will rationalize tools to increase creativity, to enable flow and to catalyze their organization's return to greatness. Shifting to creativity, requires us to ask a fundamentally different question. Our obsession with productivity metrics has to morph to a ruthless focus on eliminating distractors. These can start as local experiments to gain buy in. For instance, what if the entire company stopped using chat for a whole week? What would happen if the entire company agreed to have email open only for 2 hours in a day? What if you could not schedule internal meetings one day each week? What if we built software that allows people to go into a focus mode, in the click of a button, suppresses all notifications and publishes it a leaderboard to promote focus as a core cultural tenet. What does it take to build a unified search portal across all collaboration tools?These are some ideas and questions we are exploring at Palantir. We are early in our journey but have conviction that the return to creativity is an idea worth pursuing. More broadly, I posit that initiatives along these dimensions would firmly shift the CIO from being a hapless spectator to the avant-garde in tacking a core problem that stifles organizations and humans today.