If you are mainly using collaboration tools to support virtual conversations then travel reduction is likely the big benefit. To get the really big benefits in other areas you have to explicitly go there. You usually get what you ask for, at best.

This was the case with knowledge management. The only really successful KM efforts that I saw were ones that were aligned with business processes such as product development or customer service. In these aligned cases, I saw documented benefits such as reduced time to market, increase in successful cross selling and reductions in repeat calls on the same service issue.

Bill Ives, reporting on a recent Forrester report, puts his finger on the reasons businesses are seeing only limited benefits from their investment in collaboration tools. The mistake they have made (as many also made with KM) has been to see collaboration (or KM) as self-evidently and intrinsically good. In fact, they only have limited intrinisic value.

The real value (as John Hagel made clear in his talk at last month's Social Business Summit in London) comes from deployments of the right tools in the places they will make most impact. That requires those responsible (whether IT or KM professionals) to work closely with senior people in the business to identify the metrics that matter (cost, performance, etc.), where there is underperformance against those metrics, and what can be done to change turn that underperformance around.

That kind of strategic approach means we stop using a hammer on screws. It also means we might be able to buy a smaller hammer, because that is all the nails need.