More and more people are aware of the increase in the use of collaboration tools such as instant messaging, telephony, video conferencing, wikis and blogs. These technologies can represent the intersection between people, facilities and geography within an organisation but will never replace face-to-face communication that will always provide the richest form of communication.
More and more people are aware of the increase in the use of collaboration tools such as instant messaging, telephony, video conferencing, wikis and blogs. These are the latest wave of collaborative technologies that build on Internet, xml, and html foundations. Wikis, the online encyclopedia, are an online document that can be commented and edited by everybody – becoming very popular as an alternative to document repositories; blogs are personal websites and diaries that are updated regularly, advertised to a wide community and invite feedback. Although these ’new’ uses of existing technology are not really novel there is increasing demand to use this type of functionality within organisations in a secure, encrypted fashion to allow frank discussion and disagreement without eavesdropping from competitors or crooks. Organisations would like to access these ‘services’ over the Internet and to be available on their desktop or hand held devices. These technologies can represent the intersection between people, facilities and geography within an organisation but will never replace face-to-face communication that will always provide the richest form of communication.
However with a dispersed or mobile workforce, organisations want to connect their people and facilities across geography for a number of reasons. These include:
They want to be more efficient in dealing with their existing processes;
They want to make quicker decisions;
They may want to create an informal ‘water cooler’ culture throughout the organisation to disseminate information;
They want immediate feedback for important questions or critical situations;
They want to be able to respond quicker to new threats and crises; and
They want to generate new answers to new questions
This list is not exhaustive but underlines the hopes that are attached to the collaboration technologies. However simply providing access to these technologies will not necessarily result in the desired outcome and that there needs to be a more directed approach to reap the benefits of collaboration.
Successful results from collaboration require a critical mass of engaged, heterogeneous users. To achieve this engagement we must appeal to the users' self interest, curiosity or competitive instincts rather than ask them to work together as this is more likely to establish commitment. Unfortunately, the earliest examples of collaboration spaces can seem a little homogenous. There are already blogs, particularly around technology issues, which are dying of neglect, as they do not offer enough to engage or challenge regular viewers and wikipedia has received criticism for the accuracy of some of its content. However, collaborative technologies can provide people with a voice who have something to say; a forum for debate; a workshop where problems can be examined or a continuous brainstorming session but can also dissuade people from contributing to the conversation due to inaccessibility or a sense of exclusivity.
It is difficult to quantify the benefits of including people in these discussions who are effectively disenfranchised. For example, the people are not based in the headquarters, are regarded being low in the organisation hierarchy or are in operational roles may not be able to connect into discussions and meetings that impact their area. The people who can provide real world insights and input into decisions have no input into decisions or strategy except filtered via a 3rd party after a time delay. The cost benefits of collaboration needs to reflect the value of adding a new person into the network rather than delivering the discussions over fresh mediums. New opportunities could be identified with a larger network, ideas could be exposed to the critique of a larger, more diverse audience and existing talent can be uncovered from within the organisation by giving them access to meetings and forums that were previously closed off to them. This technological equivalent of reverse discrimination may be required to refresh some organisations that have become stale in terms of content but professional in their modes of communication to the outside world.
Improved use of collaboration technologies will involve a significant cultural change for many organisations. Smaller organisations intuitively understand the to collaborate with other organisations simply to have a market presence. Larger organisations tend to rely on their business structure as the framework for internal collaboration and use legal, contractual or organisational links to speak to the outside world. However this will need to change if they want to remain up-to-date in an increasingly competitive and connected world
What will a collaborative culture look and feel like? It will provide informal, non-hierarchical links across the organisation and between organisations. Processes and alliances will grow organically and die as the reason for their existence disappears. The participants in a process will take more responsibility and feel more ownership over the process and the results. There will be less hierarchical control and more lateral movement between the groups in a business as a problem is treated case style and moved around and discussed until completed. Process controls will become looser and management oversight is required rather than management command and control. Such changes will be seismic in impact as the tendency is to develop standards, processes and templates that enforce compliance rather than act as an enabling or facilitation tool. Management support for such streamlining will be mandatory.
How will life be different for the collaborative citizen? The current deluge of emails will reduce to a trickle as emails are used for more formal, negotiated decisions. However there will be an increase in more continuous, interactive conversations with a net result of a higher number of small decisions made more frequently. Discipline will be needed to ensure that people are not sidetracked into replicating water cooler conversions online.
