Collaboration: A useful post from Matt Pope
I was thinking more about Mike Helfrich's essay on Technology Confined Collaboration? at lunch today.
When it comes to collaboration, technology (and more precisely, technology architecture) can doom the best laid plans around enterprise collaboration.
There is seemingly a disconnect between how organizations envision "collaboration" happening, and how real people actually do it. The vast majority of collaboration solutions are process intensive. By their very nature, process-oriented activities require forethought and planning. The problem is that people don't have explicit "I need to collaborate..." thoughts. They just do it, without a moments notice, as a means to accomplish whatever needs to get done (the real work). It is an input, not an output. If you think of an individual's work flow as a stack with the output at the top, it's clear that the further down the stack you go, the less forethought occurs. As you go down, the activities (inputs) become far less structured; they look more ad-hoc than planned.
The IT lady summed it up best when she said, "web collaboration doesn't work the way people do." Technology was confining the natural human collaborative process. This particular product was forcing these folks (all 26,000 of them) into working with a fixed set of tools, which was the real problem. If your problem didn't fit almost exactly into the function set the tool provided, you were forced to change the way YOU work.
I disagree a bit on this point. I don't think the fixed set of tools is the crux of the issue. Over time people will change the way they work IF new tools (fixed or not) make them more productive. [The way I work today is unrecognizable to how I worked in 1992, before the net became pervasive.] That is, they must be the "right" tools. Further, it must be simple to be productive with those tools. Think of how most people collaborate today - phone, fax, email. That is a fixed set of tools, but they are productive tools - even if inefficient at times - because they are direct, and immediate, and always accessible, and everyone uses them. I think Mike hits on the real problem when he says:
Compound this by being forced to work within the firewall and the need to have IT set up a space and the point is made.
It's not simple to be productive with process-oriented collaboration tools because there are technology (e.g. firewalls, network connectivity) and administrive (e.g. permission, set-up) boundaries. The lack of flexibility and end-user control over the tools creates a lot of *noise* throughout the process and precludes any sense of immediacy. Not to mention the firewall issue specifically, which implies that there are certain people that I can't collaborate with even if I need to.
What is the requisite laundry list to make net-based collaboration/communication really take off? The answer isn't obvious to me, but here are a few suggestions (from the end-user perspective; surely there is a separate IT-perspective list)....
- As simple to use as email or the phone
- End-user driven
- Fast and familiar
- No network boundaries
- No administrative boundaries
- The "right" tools (messaging, file sharing, user presence, and more over time)
- Flexibility to (a) over time, add new tools to meet new modes of usage, (b) interact in public or private context, depending upon the situation, (c) add or drop people from a thread of communication on an as-needed basis
- Ubiquity of network connectivity, hardware, and software
The list items are unstructured, not mutually exclusive, and far from exhaustive. They sort of look like an unrealistic (near term) panacea; nontheless, it's a start. I hope others out there have an interest in expanding it and/or taking it in different directions... [Matt Pope's Radio Weblog]
11:45:39 AM 
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