This is a common answer when asking why the technology has been chosen; or the other common one, “so we can do social”.

The thing is though, that no-one stops to ask the obvious question – what does collaboration mean to you?  How about team work?  Or a team?  What defines those?  What does “do social” mean?  Are collaboration, teams, team work and social the same thing?  If not, why not and how are they different? What about social collaboration then? All lovely buzzwords…

While there are not necessarily right or wrong answers to what they mean – what is important is to define what they mean in your company – get to a shared understanding or they just become platitudes. If you don’t know what they mean, how do you build an intranet to achieve those goals or get users to adopt SharePoint?  Decide what they are to you and go from there.