Those of you who have been loyal readers of my work over the years will recognize a consistent theme where I talk about how we use computers to collaborate on projects. I came to work this morning to hear several complaints via IM from a friend who has an evil co-worker that was berating her about her ideas. “What a way to say good morning,” said my friend to me. That got me thinking.

We have come a long way on the route towards better collaboration, with fancier tools, higher-speed networks, and near ubiquitous Internet access, but the people part of the equation is still somewhat lacking. Let’s take a trip down memory lane and I’ll point out some of the things that I have seen over the years.

My most recent column on collaboration describes the British crypto program Colossus and how thousands of people worked over several years to decode German dispatches during World War II. That was collaboration with a capital C. The equipment was barely functional, and the workflows to get the job done were brutally complex. But it worked, because everyone pulled together and did their part and respected the individual roles that each had to play. So this is noteworthy because of the time period and the level of actual collaboration that took place.

But Colossus happened with everyone working in very close quarters, dictated by the wartime requirements and how the machine was constructed. In the modern era, we are more concerned about incorporating collaboration when we have distributed work teams. I had to deal with this early on, when in 1990 I founded Network Computing magazine and we hired the best editors from all around the country. Back then it was a challenge, especially as we had to build trust and help foster a sense of purpose with people that had never met face-to-face.

This is still an issue today. In this recent post for WPCurve, Don Virgillito talks about what he has seen from the best collaborative teams that were distributed geographically. He suggests that you should “consider existing remote work experience as an essential skill.” And you’ll also “have to grow as a team to continue being a team, which would involve meetings, team training, retreats to boost morale, and real-life meetings when possible to build long lasting relationships.” That is exactly what we did back in the early 1990s, and it worked so well that the magazine continued using some of these practices long after I left its helm.

As far back as 2008, I was writing about this people side of collaboration:

So, as PC processors get faster, disks get bigger, and our social networks get larger, we still don’t have the perfect collaboration solution. We still think of the data on our hard disks as our own, not our employer’s. Sharing is still for sissies. Until that attitude changes, the headphones will stay firmly stuck in our ears, blocking out the rest of the world around us.

How many of us are still stuck in a similar situation? And as more “bullpen” style office configurations are created, this only worsens the scenario.

If we look closer at the people relationships than the technology, we’ll see a lot more insights into how collaboration happens. That was the subject of this post from 2009 where a survey of collaboration habits found a key staffer way down the food chain was the glue that held things together. He worked closely with all the different stakeholders and pushed for better collaboration between departments, because the bosses of each department didn’t know how to talk to each other. Another part of this survey found that companies should focus on their least communicative employees: if they can bring them up even just slightly at being better communicators they will greatly improve productivity.

Let’s turn to the tools used for collaboration.

In 1990, we didn’t have the Internet, and setting up email meant running our own system that dialed into each of our remote offices to route messages around. IM and cell phones didn’t exist yet, so remote editors had to find payphones and RJ11 jacks for their modems. We spent a lot of time sending large graphics files around on our network because there wasn’t any other way to share them. In many ways, it was the dark ages of collaboration tools.

But as email became successful, it also brought overuse, something that we still wrestle with today. By 2009 we were focused more on cutting down on back-and-forth emails and improving remote access. In an article that I wrote for an IT publication then I talked about the various tools that were available, some of which are still being used today. (A chart that I prepared for my website is woefully outdated, but will give you a picture of what things I was looking at.)

And in this story that I wrote for Baseline magazine in 2011, I looked at other ways that collaboration happens, using screen sharing, document management and workflow management tools. For example at one after-market auto parts chain, installers can get the schematics of the car they are working on at the moment they need them, thanks to a collaboration tool that integrates into their workflow.

Since then, we have all sorts of fancy stuff to use. A recent review last year for Computerworld looks at three of them: Glip, Slingshot, and Flow. While none of the three are perfect, we have come a long way since the early days pre-Web. And if you click on that link above for the WPCurve article, you will see dozens of other suggestions of what the latest startups use for their collaboration technologies.

So yes, the history of collaboration has been one of fits and starts, making some of the same mistakes over again and not really considering the historical context. I hope you find the journey as interesting as I have.

Living in the Midwest, I consider what life is like in the Rust Belt, where aging manufacturing companies have come and gone. When I first moved to St. Louis, all three of the domestic car makers had plants here: now we are down to just one of them. I was talking to a friend of mine who mentioned that she is seeing something similar: some enterprises are still stuck with their “rust belt” version of IT services and have yet to make their move. Whether their businesses will suffer the same fate as some of the manufacturing industry is hard to say.

So I thought I would talk to another friend of mine, who is the IT director at a Midwest steel mill and get his perspective. He has a small IT shop of six people but they are doing some interesting things to keep their plant competitive. “We can’t really innovate on our product line, but we have to do things from an IT perspective to serve our customers better and become more productive and cost effective,” he told me. Here is how he does it:

Get rid of aging equipment. While he still has a few Windows XP machines around, most of his IT gear is the latest and greatest. He is in the process of upgrading his Cisco network infrastructure, for example. Some of his most ancient computers that run his plant are connected to logic controllers, just because they don’t require much horsepower and they are on the plant floor where the environment is brutal. “Eventually, we will replace these when they break or migrate one of our older office PCs to there.”

Beware of legacy systems. “We were able to leapfrog other steel companies with our technology, because when we started the company we didn’t nave many legacy systems.” Now he has three developers who build custom apps that are used for handling their steel inventory and steel operations, along with a customer portal. For example, his team built a custom automated scheduling system when one of the two people in that department retired. Now it takes the remaining staffer just part of the day to do the scheduling, and they have cut wasted product and improved their steel yields tremendously, saving them money too.

Make use of the cloud and virtualization where it makes sense. “When I started with the company, we had a single PC server that was running everything. Now we have virtual servers and are looking at converged storage infrastructure too.” One of his first decisions was to employ Google Apps for their enterprise email. “That was a slam-dunk and one of the best decisions I ever made.”  He is looking at acquiring other cloud-based apps as well,

Vendor flexibility. Part of moving to the cloud means making use of services that don’t require vendor lock-in “I want to have options to migrate away from them if things don’t work out. That is why I haven’t gotten involved in SAP or Salesforce yet, there isn’t any easy way to walk away from them.”

Segregate production and office networks. As the stories from the German steel mill in December can testify, having totally separated networks between the office and the mill are critical. Hackers used an infected email to literally trash one of the mills. “We have different networks and vLANs so this won’t happen to us.”

Your own rust belt conditions might differ, for example, you might still be using Systems Network Architecture on your mainframes, or connecting via Frame Relay networks. So it might be a good time to reconsider these and other technologies, and start investing in your future. (The building pictured above is from an old automotive plant that has been renovated into condos, by the way.)