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About the Author
Stowe Boyd is a well-known media subversive,
and an internationally recognized authority on real-time, collaborative
and social technologies. His new blog is Message.
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June 14, 2005
June 12, 2005
Posted by Arieanna Foley
Does IT Matter? This is the discussion I recently had with Larry Cannel, who has been an integrated part of the Collaborative Applications Group at Ford Motor Company since 1998. As a leader in the IT side of driving collaborative technology strategies, he has some great insight to the actual deployment and adoption of collaborative tools. Part of leading change is understanding new technologies and how they can solve enterprise knowledge and collaborative needs. Larry will be speaking at the Collaborative Technologies Conference, which starts in just a week now, on Collaborative Strategy and how IT can drive these strategies. In essence, Larry argues that IT does indeed matter.
Can IT lead collaborative strategies? Or should it be left to each vertical function to find their own means? Larry strongly asserts that, in most cases, IT are the only ones in the position to do so. However, it really does depend on the individual or team leading the process. One crucial component is perspective. Is IT the owner of the collaboration tool or are they the operator of it? Most of the time IT is simply the operator of technology - you throw out a tool like audioconferencing then just walk away. However, with collaborative tools, they must step up to be the owners. Here is the distinction in perspective: as an operator, the focus is on saving cost and avoiding risk; as an owner, the focus is on creating value and seeking opportunities to create value - on making it easier for people to meet and collaborate. To do so, they must drive the change. So, changing perspective is the first step, and it's one obviously on the shoulders of individuals. The role of IT has changed, and people must change with it.
How can IT ensure that collaboration tools are used to create value? Part of this comes in how its adopted. IT has a role to show people why something creates value - to show them how to post files in a wiki, for example, rather than dumping them to email. Reinforcing value creates a pull effect. IT can even go so far as to start using the tools themselves - to become the best practice community for others to watch and learn. Just like I discussed with Ross Mayfield on the topic of wikis, there should be a balance of bottom-up/grassrots adoption along with driving the change top-down. However, Larry and Ross differ in opinion on ownership. Ross argues for shared ownership, whereas Larry argues for IT ownership. I can see the validity in both arguments, and I'm sure it's a long-standing debate that I'm just grazing now.
Go read more of the ownership discussion on the CTC blog.
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June 10, 2005
Posted by Arieanna Foley
Lisa Kimball and I talked a bit about virtual teams and what can accost them to make them go off track. Lisa founded Group Jazz in 2000 - her focus has been on how to create effective teams and communities online and offline. Lisa will be heading up two very interesting groups at the Collaborative Techhnologies Conference. One session will be a tutorial on effective virtual teams, the other will be a shorter speech on the same topic.
What is a virtual team? Simply, it just means people who are in different locations or companies that must work together. Lisa made the point to clarify that virtual teams really are just teams - same challenges, problems, needs, and dynamics. The only difference is that these teams, versus co-located teams, perhaps suffer from more, and earlier, team dysfunction than do non-virtual teams. Virtual teams are not just distributed across time and space, they are also often made up of people from different functions, departments or organizations. Toss in the fact that people may be on more than one team, that your team expands and contracts at irregular points and that your boss may not be everyone's boss. Sounds complex, doesn't it?
Without face-to-face interaction, problems tend to show up earlier and corrections are much more difficult to make on the fly. Before you know it, you may have taken a wrong turn in your project or your team dynamic and it will be harder to turn back the longer you leave it unchecked. With virtual teams, you cannot read people in the same way - body language, tone of voice and all of these important things are lost. Assumptions we don't know we make are suddenly taken out of the equation. The problems that can occur more frequently and/or earlier with virtual teams range from breaking the ice to trust to sustaining forward momentum and shared vision. We need to solve these team issues with more than technology. We need to processes to help manage these complicated social networks, to help foster communication, and make sure the team creates value as a whole.
What are the top three reasons virtual teams fail? According to Lisa, these are:
1. People lose the sense of the whole. They only see what they are doing and have no way to "look across the room" to see what others are doing. Lack of context kills.
2. Assumptions are not explicitly stated.
3. People don't enjoy it - they don't have fun. Without the laughs to go along with the work, it feels less "human" and the lack of personal interaction is dispiriting.
So, one of the key ways to make your virtual team happy is to make your team happy. Period. So, let's look at what makes a good team in general. Throwing people together does not a team make; a team is measured by its interconnectedness and the understanding of its goals and roles. One important step to achieving this is to create a team charter that outlines the purpose of the team, its norms, everyones roles, and how success will be measured. You don't need to write this down or talk about it in an overly formal way, but you do need to address this early on. And regularly.
Read more on how to create a better team on the CTC blog.
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June 08, 2005
Posted by Arieanna Foley
Ross Mayfield, co-founder and CEO of Socialtext, and I had a great chat yesterday about wikis and group productivity. I have to say it was a very informative conversation - Ross was very eloquent and had a lot to teach me about wikis in particular. Although I have an account with Socialtext, I am more than convinced that I have not used it to its fullest extent.
Socialtext is a wiki-based social software aimed at the enterprise market. The idea was to take wikis plus blogs and add tools, and support, to make it easy to use by enterprise customers for collaboration. The use of blogs & wikis for collaboration, will be covered by Ross at the upcoming Collaborative Technologies Conference, now less than two weeks away.
So, what are the benefits to using something like Socialtext, or more generally, wikis and blogs, for collaboration? Well, let's look at the most common method of collaboration today. Email is high on the list. How many emails do you receive each day from people in your project group? How many are to you that don't get shared? How many are group emails you may not wish to get? And do you really spend the time to organize them to find them later? Worse still, do you ever look at them again?
The average Fortune 1000 employee spends 4 hours in email everyday, where email captures 75% of knowledge and 90% of collaboration time. So, email carries with it a lot of inefficiencies in productivity and, by its archiving system and inconsistent sending lists, does not foster group memory. My email archive is different from those in my project team - my memory of the project is just one of many isolated threads of the overall picture - our group memories are disrupted, and there is no way to easily share them with new group members.
 Wikis, when used for project communication instead of group emails can help solve these issues. Socialtext has found that time savings and shared understanding through access to information can reduce the project cycle by 25%. Group emails create occupational spam; with a wiki, you can choose which material you are notified of, how often, and in what form (email, RSS). This type of asynchronous communication gives you the control.
Read more on the CTC blog...
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June 04, 2005
Posted by Arieanna Foley
I emailed back and for with Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress. The topic was not WordPress directly, although I do have a WordPress powered blog and would have loved to chat on that too. Rather, we spent some time talking about collaboration tools, open source, and how companies can get going using non commercial collaboration tools such as blogs and wikis.
Matt will be a speaker at the Collaborative Technologies Conference on the topic of Open Source Collaboration Solutions.
My opening question was to ask Matt what kind of collaboration tools he used. Well, WordPress, like many projects today, is distributed - most work is virtual. Therefore, you do not have the option of collaboration tools such as a piece of paper - rather, one must turn online for solutions. The WordPress folks use Subversion for source control, and Trac for coordinating bugs and getting some code insight. More generally, they use wikis a lot.
All of the documentation is user-generated in a wiki using the same software that Wikipedia does, called Mediawiki. For communication between developers we use AIM, lots of mailing lists and email, and an IRC channel that has chats 24/7 and a weekly IRC meeting.
I think blogs and wikis are collaborative technologies of the highest sort. I think many enterprise systems I've been exposed to were over-engineered and too complicated, things need to be as simple as humanly possible and have a flexible UI (like email) to really take off.
I agree with Matt when he says that blogs and wikis will bring the greatest impact to the corporate world over the next world. We've already witnessed how blogs can be used externally to generate communication between customer and company, and now we're just starting to see how blogs, not to mention wikis, can be used internally to enhance communication and collaboration with very little work. And that's the important thing. As I've noted before, collaboration must be seamless to be used. Anything that creates more work or detracts from the task rather than making it easier will fail to get the internal adoption it needs to take off.
When it came time to examine the benefits of open source collaboration tools, I wanted to know what Matt saw as the benefits of open source vs. commercial applications. And benefits other than just cost, of course. This is the response I got:
The traditional benefits of Open Source over proprietary tools are pretty widely regarded, now that companies like IBM, HP, and Novell are batting for open source software there's not as much as a fight for legitimacy. I think in the long term open source software has the brightest and most promising future, I wouldn't want my company reliant on someone else's business model in such a rapidly changing market. Selling software is dead.
Continue reading "Why collaborate with Open Source tools"
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May 27, 2005
Posted by Arieanna Foley
I had a brief but compelling chat with Eugene Kim a couple of days back. Eugene is cofounder of Blue Oxen Associates, a think tank that works on improving collaboration. He personally works a good deal on open source and interoperability and has cocreated PurpleWiki, an open source collaborative tool. Eugene will be speaking at the upcoming Collaborative Technologies Conference on 'How to Collaborate Without Really Trying' and will be moderating two other very interesting panels. His speech will definitely bring to light the problems that often come with complex and expensive collaboration tools. He'll be going over some lightweight and open source tools that can offer simple ways to streamline collaboration efforts.
From my conversation with him, I can tell that Eugene is a huge proponent of simplicity. If you only need a piece of paper, then just go ahead and use that piece of paper rather than buying a complex and cumbersome tool. In fact, when I asked Eugene what his favourite collaborative tool was, he unhesitatingly said "a piece of paper." It really can be that simple. Sketch, jot down, pass around. Easy.
I like how Larry defined the issue in his last post on CTC: "Collaboration is how we work together. Collaborative technologies present opportunities to work together more effectively." Though the opportunity may be present to optimize workflow, at the same time it can also hinder it. Sometimes, as Eugene noted, a piece of paper can still be a powerful collaborative tool.
Aside from paper, Eugene strongly believes in the power of wikis. They are a very simple tool to use, manage and learn. I think online collaboration, personally, is more powerful for one simple reason: links. Files and ideas can be linked together in ways that you cannot always do otherwise. I was surprised to hear that Eugene thinks that we could actually be seeing some good lightweight tools from Microsoft. I've had some bad Microsoft collaboration experiences just due to the amount of work it took to manage. So, we'll have to see. Other cool tools: TWiki, del.icio.us, Jotspot, Socialtext, and RSS feeds. For those of you wondering, we did have our conversation via Skype - how's that for collaboration.
So, if there are easy tools out there, how does collaboration go so wrong so often? Well, you've got pressure from IT and finance, constrained thinking office-wide about what constitutes a collaborative/social tool, and then you have the whole stigma around collaborative technologies that are actually inexpensive: people just don't take them seriously simple because they are affordable. Go figure.
Continue reading my article over on the Collaborative Technologies Conference Blog.
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August 28, 2003
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Corante is a Research Sponsor of the Instant Messaging Research Forum, an on-line community of interest. There are a number of reports and white papers provided by various sponsors, and I hope that in the upcoming weeks and months we will develop a lively interchange between the members of the Forum. Participation is free, so take a look.
To browse the Forum, click here.
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