The economic news is depressing, and yet I want to see opportunity where others see looming disaster. And I think one way we can try to make things better is become more productive and do a better job collaborating with each other. Think of it as a no-cost stimulus package that even the Republicans can love
Remember when the PC was first introduced, everyone thought it was such a great personal productivity tool? Sadly, the more powerful that PCs have become, the harder it is to use them to collaborate. This is because we get used to using them as our personal machines, and most of us don’t like sharing our computers, let alone our work products from them.
The primary collaboration tool today is still what it was ten years ago: I send you an email attachment with a Word or Excel file. You make changes and then email the file back for me to look at. This is really serial collaboration, because we alternate working on the same file. While this model is okay for two people, when you have a whole group that is trying to add their thoughts it gets very messy, to say the least. Also, one person can hold up the entire process and then the rest of the group has to wait until that person has finished their revisions. And if we don’t agree, we pretty much have to start the process from scratch. A friend of mine is ghost writing a book for two of his bosses. I can’t imagine what his editing cycle is going to be like under this model.
It is time to realize that serial email-style collaboration is so last year. Consider these trends:
First, the Internet is now ubiquitous and most of us are comfortable using it to connect to our partners, supplies, customers, and colleagues. It has also made email more powerful, and most of us have become addicted to checking our email several times a day and even during off hours too. Some of us have to check email so frequently that we start to get a bit jittery when we are offline for a few hours, let alone when we want to take a week off on some deserted beach where there isn’t any connectivity.
Contrast this with Lotus Notes, which has been around for about 20 years and supposed to be the be-all and end-all collaborative tool, or Microsoft’s SharePoint, which is more recent. Both Notes and Sharepoint require everyone to run it, and develop to its own programming interfaces. That seems so quaint and outmoded now. And both are very quirky to install and deploy, which makes them less desirable too.
Second, email is a great notification system and a great way to organize your to-do list. You don’t have to use it as the transportation system for sending documents around, though. As an example, you can set up a blog to automatically notify via email when someone posts a comment to a particular page, so people can participate in a discussion thread but don’t have to continually return to that page to find out what has been posted.
Third, free or low-cost Internet applications have come of age, such as Google Docs, Google Calendar, Trackvia, Tripit, Timedriver, Hourtown and Setmeeting. All of these don’t require any software to download, don’t have a lot of upfront training or even any dough to use, which means that people can experiment with them and see if they will be suitable for their needs. All of these products can offload some of the tasks that we are used to doing on email and make us more productive in scheduling meetings, sharing work product, and arranging our time. Look for a story from me in the New York Times next month on this topic.
Fourth, instant messaging has become more useful for connecting remote work teams together and can be used as another notification system that is more immediate and more potent in terms of bringing people together. Some firms are beginning to use the built-in IM features of Facebook and Twitter for this purpose too. Again, this takes some load away from looking at your inbox for starting a particular task or trying to get a colleague’s attention.
Finally, there are other tools for two-person collaboration that will work better in real time, such as LogMeIn or GoToMyPC, that allow two people to actually see each other’s computer screen while they are talking on the phone. My podcasting partner Paul Gillin likes Yuuguu.com, which allows teams of 25 to share the same desktop, no matter if they are on Linux, Mac or Windows.
We still have a long way to go when it comes to collaborating effectively, and I since we are talking about sharing do share your own stories with my audience and post your comments here. I will have more to say on this topic for a keynote speech that I am giving in Philadelphia in April for the American Hardware Manufacturer’s Association. If you want me to come talk to your organization, you can send me email, or better yet, just call me on the phone.
Good post! After many years of developing and working with collaboration tools, though, I suspect that better / faster / cheaper tools don’t solve the problem. We have tools out the proverbial wazoo, but email remains the “least common denominator” for information sharing. Everyone has it and already uses it frequently during the day. For an alternative to be successful, everyone in the group must adopt new habits. It’s hard for an individual to change habits, let alone an entire group, and most collaboration tools won’t succeed if even a small fraction of the team can’t or won’t use them. One or two holdouts can put a significant drag on adoption
I can’t cite any research in this area, but I’d speculate that any alternative to “just email me the file” are most likely to succeed if (1) your group consists entirely of enthusiasts who enjoy
learning new tools (in which case you’ll probably spend a lot of time arguing about which one is better) or (2) use of the tool is mandated by someone with managerial authority. In the latter case, the tool’s “champion(s)” will need to cajole, remind, and persuade the team to use the tool (“please put this in the wiki instead of emailing it to the group”) for some time before habits change.
I’m certainly cognizant of my own bias here. Most of my collaborations are with people of my own generation. I wonder if groups in their 20s and early 30s are more likely to adopt other tools for collaborative work, just as they have found alternatives to email for social / personal communication?
Agree, emailing docs around is not the best way to get things done.
In my opinion email as the preferred communication medium is definitely a generational thing. In the business world I think you need managers or team leads in a company to be comfortable with a tool and to care about its advantages over email. The next gen will know and be comfortable with a wider variety of tools. We could slowly start moving away from email when they are running the teams and companies out there but it’ll take time.
Thanks for the mention, David. You’re exactly right – we believe everyone these days needs to be as productive as they possibly can, squeezing all the inefficiency they can out of their daily operations, and one opportunity is to cut out the latency and wasted time that people normally invest in appointment scheduling. It works; our users report it to us month after month.
Ed Mallen
President and CEO, TimeTrade Systems
Maker of TimeDriver personal appointment scheduler
and TimeTrade enterprise appointment systems
Barry Gerber says:
In the end, the failure of collaboration can be laid at the feet of
trust or, rather, mistrust. Unless you can trust all of the people in
your ascribed work group to use shared documents in a wise and
productive way, you wind up using such documents as top-down
communication tools: Google calendars where one person, usually a
secretary, is the only one with write rights, and with everyone sending
their calendar info to the secretary for posting on the calendar; Google
word docs or spreadsheets with corporate policies and other broadcast
information managed by the same secretary. When, if ever, we can rid the
work world of incompetence and disruptive acts, we’ll be better able to
use collaborative tools. Until then, I vote for email-driven
collaborative workflow. Another point a lot of people don’t get, despite
our desire to bring democracy to everything after 8 years of oligarchy,
maybe there are some tasks, especially in the business world, that
benefit from less, rather than more from inclusive collaborative
processes. I’ve found that the initial development of editorial, sales
and marketing ideas benefits most from a small 2-3 person group of
highly motivated, intelligent, experts. Once the product is shaped, it’s
time to move it into the broader arena for input.
Bruce Fryer mentions in his blog post here:
http://brucefryer.blogs.com/weblog/2009/01/alternatives-to-salesforcecom.html
About issues installing SugarCRM and suggests that an alternative open source product vTiger might be easier
I’m not sure what to take away from this post.
For synchronous collaboration like IM or web conferencing — I’m not sure that will save the economy. It may make use more productive but it hurts the travel business.
And I think you’re missing something by putting sharepoint and notes in the same league. Notes was good for it’s day but it is a dinosaur and quirky. Sharepoint is actually very easy and very powerful — especially when it comes to the ease of creating forms, workflows, integration with other apps, etc…
Products like sharepoint should have some ROI associated with it. It’s all about automating the front office business processes — just as the focus in the 80s was about supply chain, 90s were about back office ERP. And that will definitely help the economy if companies actually save money and increase profits, etc..
And the one trend you don’t mention specifically is the cloud. Low cost alternatives are not quite a consideration for the enterprise. MS and IBM are and will compete in the cloud. There are a lot obvious concerns with the cloud including security and integration with in-house applications. Google apps might be okay for small businesses or schools — but it will take a number of years before a large IT organization will consider replacing the MS or IBM infrastructure with Google.