Steve Yost on ubiquitous collaboration tools. Steve Yost, inventor and proprietor of QuickTopic, disagrees with David Weinberger's assertion that collaborative software fails to thrive because companies are afraid to "hyperlink the hierarchy." The real problem is more mundane, Steve says: ... [Jon's Radio]
Lots of organizations are extremely interested in collaborative tools now. The main reason they can't successfully adopt collaborative technology is because you can't get people to all go use new technology at once, yet in the face of simple email and browser use, that's what's necessary: the new technology usage has to be unanimous. If one person in a group can't or won't use the new tech, the forum reverts to the least common denominator -- ubiquitous email. The Boston Globe article David cites says just this:
But two big challenges face Boston's merchants of collaboration software. First is the need for the technology to show real business results real fast - rather than just ''greasing'' the way work gets done in an intangible way. Some people believe that e-mail will remain the dominant collaborative technology, and it will be hard for other, more complex software packages to supplant it.
I've been contemplaing this issue of collaboration at work for the past few weeks. I'm working on a newsletter for IT that is going to be distributed to the rest of the company to explain what we are doing and build support. One idea I've been contemplating is using open source web logging or portal software to convert the static IT intranet page into an ongoing narrative of the projects and work that is going on. The technology seems easy to set up but I fear being shot down for two reasons that are mentioned in the article above and the deeper links.
- What if we or someone else posts something that management doesn't like? I'd like to believe that management is enlightened enough to accept criticism and, in most cases it is, however accepting criticism in conversation or having an open door management policy is a lot different from seeing it publicly displayed on the intranet.
- I've tried using some of the newsgroup features that come bundled with Lotus Notes for managing distributed projects but the people involved have resoundingly failed to participate. No one says the idea is bad, they just never use it. Strange?
9:10:17 PM 
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