The switching costs of multi-modal interaction techniques are inefficient and awkward. Imagine all the methods used today to communicate and collaborate, such as email, phone, instant messaging, Web conferencing, face-2-face, paper, white boards, etc. All of these so-called point systems emerged as new technology enabled them. Efforts at combining them have been anecdotal and unsuccessful. The barriers between them are substantial.
Why do these boundaries exist? A lot has to do with traditions, norms and socio-technical expectations. These barriers are among the most difficult to overcome because the deal primarily with behaviors and trust. To drive integrated collaborative environments, deliberate efforts must address behaviors. Factors of trust include issues concerning maturity, organization and perceptions. Overcoming these barriers and the efficiency and speed of interactions becomes far greater and effective.
People have been talking about integrated electronic collaboration environments since the late fifties. Substantial progress has been made. Still, we still do not enjoy the frictionless almost unconscious switching that spans the rich mode of people-to-people interaction technologies. We have great electronic people-to-people connectivity, but only little conductivity.
Some groupware technologies like Notes helped move us in the right direction. However, Notes constrained users to conducting all manner of interaction in a Notes form. Then the Web debuted. Its elegant combination of HTTP, URL, and HTML, allowed for access to vast amounts of information and transactions. Again, liberating and constraining at the same time; the Web constrained users to interacting in a Web page. Some people even confused Web-based information access with collaboration. Of course there is email, which most all agree has reached the point of diminishing returns for collaboration. None of these is a legitimate example of the fluid, frictionless enterprise collaboration technology essential to productivity growth.
Along with these innovations arrived other point solutions, which did serve to advance the picture in various bounded domains. Instant messaging, in use by hundreds of millions, is a good example. Videoconferencing is another example, although its own problems are legend. Many have been crafted, only to fail. This famous, some now say infamous, graphic points to some of these interaction domains and the point systems that serve them. http://www.kmcluster.com/Communities%20of%20Practice.jpg
Fortunately, offerings are emerging that exhibit careful engineering and appreciation for the behaviors and trust elements required for intermodal success. The key to these offerings is transparent boundaries between collaborative modes. The seamless and effortless transitions between interaction modes in a rich collaborative environment drive out boundary switching costs. Unique invitation-only name space management drives the anthropomorphic trust matrix essential to electronic interaction. Finally, the 'clip-in' and ad hoc nature of new collaborative components supports collaboration as maturity and sophistication increase. This point is key and cannot be overemphasized. Techniques that responding instantly to increasing trust and interaction will deliver exponential increases in people-to-people conductivity.
The future of intermodal collaboration is bright. Desktop offerings such as Groove Networks are leading the way. Cellular telephony appliances that download feature sets according to the users are like the pocket knives of intermodal collaboration. If offerings continue to be engineered and deployed within the domain of social networks and trust, transaction costs for intermodal collaboration wiill be reduced substantially.
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