Collaboration tools and platforms are seemingly everywhere these days.

Wiki-based solutions from Atlassian, PBWorks, and Socialtext.

Activity stream platforms like Socialcast, Obayoo, and to some extent Google Wave that fit in this broad category.

Or more complex and robust collaboration and community platforms like Jive, Telligent, and Awareness.

And more and more are emerging almost every week.  Aside - I checked out a very interesting tool called Dekks last week that will be the subject of an upcoming post.

All of the above solutions have their strengths and weaknesses, and intelligent use cases can certainly be made of any of them in the correct organizational setting. Since collaboration and the introduction of more 'social' capability is on the radar of many software companies and organizations even the older, more traditional vendors are jumping in to the collaboration pool.

12SPRINTS

Recently SAP, the venerable titan of the ERP market launched (in Beta) a platform called '12SPRINTS', a collaboration tool designed to facilitate information sharing, group and team-based working, and most notably decision making. 12SPRINTS offers a combination of expected collaboration platform features (status updates, commenting, threaded discussions) with a fairly robust set of traditional business tools (Pro/Con charts, SWOT Analysis,Cost/Benefit Analysis).  This nod to the more well-understood and time-tested (some might argue old-fashioned) decision support tools aligns with 12SPRINTS stated purpose:

From the 12SPRINTS home page copy, the platform is meant to help organizations, 'Bring order to chaos and transform teamwork into results quickly'.

The framework around the process is straightforward, create an 'Activity', (could be a program, project, or simply to capture information to help make a single business decision), invite other people to collaborate on the Activity, and use a long list of delivered tools and feature to communicate, share data, brainstorm, organize, and ultimately take action.

Capability

Taking a look at a few screen prints from 12SPRINTS we can get a feel for the 'business' feel of the product, this view shows the 'Consensus' widget for driving decision making inserted into the activity:

Additional decision support tools like a Stakeholder Analysis 4-box diagram can be overlaid on the project to give a graphical look to the needs/importance of various organizational constituents:

In yet another attempt to demonstrate real business and decision process support capability to the platform, 12SPRINTS incorporates the classic 'SWOT' grid.  This SWOT can be populated collaboratively by all members of the activity.

Conclusion

When you think about it from the perspective of an organization or a business leader that perceives internal collaboration efforts or (gasp) internal social networks as a time-waster, productivity drain, or an excuse for employees to get distracted from 'real' work, then a disciplined focus on a better decision making tool makes perfect sense, and may be a much easier 'sell'.  12SPRINTS looks to provide more structure around collaborative work, and by baking many classic and well-know business frameworks into the collaboration flow it offers what some organizations may see as a more logical launchpad to introduce collaborative tools in the enterprise.

SAP has built in integrations to 12SPRINTS withWebEx for web conferencing,  Evernote for collaborative note-taking and content sharing,  and Scribd for document sharing, and these hint at SAP angling to position 12SPRINTS as an open platform where collaborative activity can be collected and managed to some extent.  Will SAP place significant resources for development and education behind 12SPRINTS? Hard to say, but the mere fact that an enterprise powerhouse like SAP is at least experimenting in this space is a sign of its increasing importance to vendors and organizations alike.

12SPRINTS is in public Beta right know, you can sign up and start experimenting today, or if you prefer, drop me a note or leave a comment and I will add you to my 12SPRINTS sandbox.