Initially research needs to be conducted. An organization should be informed about possible technologies that can be used and how they can be applied. Decisions need to be made about which technologies are going to be adopted and choices made for most suitable products or platforms for the services the organization wishes to host or establish.

Technical installation and operational implementation can be performed by in-house capacity or external consultants employed to perform this work. Systems may also need to be populated with legacy data, but all of these are a one-off cost.

Effective communications and knowledge management systems need sufficiently allotted time or they may become a liability and an embarrassment.

Websites require continual updates and new content contributions and RSS feeds from the site should ‘feed’ something to subscribers. Blogs, Discussion forum, eGroups and Social Networking sites need informed mediation without which they will not perform the function for which they are intended. This is also the case for collaborative knowledge bases and Q&A platforms.

Preparing materials with collaborative tools, may improve productivity, but adopting new collaborative or IT based delivery solutions requires additional time for additional product development.