business collaboration

Who needs a studio?

A long time ago, I was a devoted musician. I played in bands, orchestras, and ensembles. To record music, we would gather in a hall or studio and bring in a raft of equipment. Everyone had to be there all at the same time and we would work together in real time for hours to get things sounding just right.

On my way home tonight, I heard this on NPR. Now, there is no need to even get together. You can lay down your tracks, and collaborate with people you've never met over the web to lay in the other parts of your music.

Whoa, this is amazing.

A Stellar Panel Discussion

Last night I had the privilege of moderating a fantastic panel for SD Forum' s Collaboration SIG. On the panel was Joe Kraus, CEO of Jotspot; David Hornik, Venture Capitalist of August Capital; William Glazier, Venture Partner of Redwood Ventures and CEO of Timebridge; David Coleman, Managing Director of Collaborative Strategies; and Sam Pullara, CEO of Gauntlet Systems.

This panel was the premier event of the new Collaboration SIG of SD Forum. The panel explored where the business and investor focus is in the collaboration space. In addition to this top tier panel, what made the event -- and the SIG -- unique is its focus on business issues -- not just technology.

Here is a link to this podcast -- I think you will find it to be very interesting and well worthwhile. Collaboration Panel Podcast (82560.6K)

The Collaboration SIG will be meeting next in January -- I encourage you to check it out.

show me the money

As the the area of Business Collaboration is maturing some interesting developments have gotten me thinking more and more about where the money is going to be made. Earlier this year, Microsoft buys Groove -- that says Redmond sees money. But we don't exactly see Redmond making a big money play with Groove yet. Is this Office 2007? If so, I see the money. If not, then what little niche does this fill?

Now we see Intranets getting bought by WebEx. WebEx has been good at making money and Intranets has been profitable. Is this consolidation, line extension, or ramping up to a new level of play? I'm seeking the money angle here and don't quite get it yet.

Even more now, we see LinkedIn actually charging (!) customers for premium services, called "Business Services." My feeling is "about time". As a customer I've been itching for more. There have been a few times I would have paid on the spot to get more of what I wanted. (In that case, more requests -- I chafed at the 5 request limit.) So I'm encouraged by their play for the money -- and I'm interested to see where it goes.

so you think intereractive communities are a recent development

Was Googling for former colleagues and stumbled across a couple of sites that took me back to my computer roots. Long before the internet achieved critical mass, there was a worldwide network of computers -- with true and fully exploited collaborative, interactive capability. The network was called PLATO and I cut my computing teeth on it. If you don't know anything about PLATO, you should.

Link: PLATO People: A History Book Research Project.

Link: ClassicGaming.com - The History of Computer Gaming - Part 5.

if we are collaborating, then why is everything static?

These networking collaboration tools -- including LinkedIn, Ryze, and OpenBC are very useful tools. Lately, I've been building a Novell Alumni group on LinkedIn -- what an amazing way to reconnect with others -- and make new connections. Through LinkedIn, I've been contacted by people from around the world, something that truely amazes me.

Yet there is another part of me that is disappointed with these tools because they are just so static. I go to the site to see what has changed. I do some networking activities. Then I leave. I come back, to see what has changed or do some more. This just isn't good enough.

What if, instead, on my desktop or menu bar was a small item that provided me with realtime network status. Not "internet network" status but my network status. Perhaps this menu bar item would include a pulldown list of my primary contacts who are currently online right now and available for an IM. Maybe the status box would tell me how many times today and in the last week my profile has been viewed -- and in what context. Perhaps I could see an alert if pending requests of one type or another require my action-- an alert I can just click on to do the necessary care and feeding of my network. Maybe they could keep my contact address book up to date on my Palm, Outlook, or Apple Address book by, say, merging the feature set of a LinkedIn with the utility of a Plaxo and making the whole shooting match platform independent. My desktop monitor could keep it up to date for me.

And it could do much more, too, if you started to think of integrating networking activities into your desktop. You could ask it to create items your "todo" list with tasks important to your network members (like recognizing birthdays or reciprocating a luncheon appointment.) It could tell you when a job has been posted that is an excellent match for your profile and your network contacts. Or perhaps it could be smart enough to tell you when there are new people visible to your network that you should be connecting with at a higher level. Perhaps they are fellow corporate or academic alumni. Perhaps they are in your immediate geography or industry. Maybe they are people that you had indicated you wanted to be "looking out for". Maybe they fit a profile that you said you are targeting.

In short, these networking collaboration tools should be dynamic -- and they should be actively a part of your day. Doing stuff that matters for you right in front of you. If we do that, then maybe networking won't be something that people think of only when they are between jobs. Instead, maybe they will recognize that networking is the what you do to get things done.

Microsoft gets really Groovy.

It was no real surprise when Microsoft bought up Groove and Ozzie. But it is still big news. Link: InformationWeek > Microsoft > Microsoft's Groove Move > March 14, 2005.

This puts Redmond and presumably the Office empire in one of the best places of most viable new spaces -- business collaboration. It will be very exciting to see where they take Groove. I am excited because it has the opportunity to provide us with a standard yet customizable mainstream collaboration platform. You thought Lotus Notes was fun? Wait to see where this train takes you.

the missing link(ed in)

So one of the main problems I see with the social networking sites is their ability to attract and engage some of the people they need most -- those who already are busy, plugged in, totally connected and have huge "old world" networks.

Lately, I've been building networks extensively on LinkedIn. I've also used Orkut, Ryze, and Always On Network. As I have mentioned before, for me, LinkedIn is by far the best. I don't get spam from it and its business focus is crisp.

To get busy people engaged, social networks need a Bulk Request Handler
Just yesterday, the glaring need for conveniently handling bulk requests came up in a meeting with Patti Wilson, CEO of The Career Company and Laura Merling, Executive Director of SD Forum. We were chatting about LinkedIn. Patti mentioned that LinkedIn was super for building her business and very useful for her. Laura shared that a. she had tons of email already and that networking using a tool like LinkedIn that would generate tons more -- and that that was too much like adding more work, plus b. forwarding requests from people who are further down her network might give people an impression of endorsement that she is unable to correctly give. Yet people like Laura are critical to LinkedIn's success. What if you could set up rules for requests? What if you could automatically forward requests from network members based on those rules? (Every direct request from Joe Smith is automatically forwarded with a "standard" message. with perhaps other messages you could use for requests further down the tree.) This would still allow those who choose to personally deal with every request, but you could also sell this to people who otherwise won't get involved because of the 10 requests they'll get every day because they are so connected. And guess what? Those people you have to have in your network!

real time knowledge

Recently, I had a conversation with Brandon Hall . We discussed that the dual global forces of outsourcing and downsizing have created immediate needs to spontaneously reconfigure knowledge flows. My assertion is that this change, in turn, has shattered many organizations' linear, hierarchical training models. Instead of lessons leading to courses, leading to tracks, leading to certifications, we now are in a world that requires real time knowledge.

By this, I mean that when you move your call center from Peoria to New Delhi, you create an instant need for process and product knowledge somewhere where that information and those processes do not now exist. Further, when you assemble a fresh team to tackle a technical problems, you may be collaborating with people you haven't worked with before, lack key knowledge of your development processes, and use different toolsets than you. Business Collaboration Wikis, like Jotspot seem designed to allow you to create, ad hoc, your own work spaces and views of multiple data sources. (I hope to write more about Jotspot in the future -- I've requested to be a Beta user of their product.)

But to support this transition of work flow (from intensive, local to dispersed and remote), not just work flows, but knowledge, information and process flows must be supple. Information needed to accomplish the work must be accessed when needed in just the right increment. To this end, I was talking this last week with Shyam Subramanyan and Jeet Vaidya, President and Founder, respectively, of Mentorware. We discussed this trend toward increasingly shorter and more modular, extremely dense multi-sensory nuggets of information -- targeted highly toward an immediate (versus long term) need.

Since that conversation, I have been wondering -- how can BC Wikis merge with this extremely modular learning approach? We are familiar with "Googling" a topic to become an instant expert. (Oh dear, have I just "nouned" a verb?) How can we, similarly, Google a skill or knowledge set, and assemble it, on the fly as part of a BC Wiki? Shouldn't you be able to assemble the dense knowledge nuggets you need to support your task, as part of your BC Wiki, just like you would add other resources or data?

does business collaboration destroy culture?

Way back when, companies used to hire people based upon attributes like education, intelligence, character, and fit with the culture -- the central glue that made us "Us". What followed after getting hired was often a grooming process that included a succession of lower level jobs, training, and if you didn't screw up, promotion. This meant that the company invested in you over time, and a significant part of your value to the company was your knowledge of it, the way you carried the torch of values embodied by the company.

In reading about IBM's Effort to Google-ize the Enterprise it occurred to me that they weren't Google-izing the Enterprise. They were replacing another part of you. Google-izing functions of your job. But they haven't Google-ized the Enterprise. Not even close.

Think about this -- we have stopped hiring for long term fit with culture. We hire now for immediate delivery of skills to solve immediate problems. We have stopped grooming for the future and become more transactional. This has led us to automate the functions of customer relationship management (institutional knowledge of customers that used to be held by people). It has also led us to outsource engineering. And manufacturing. (Institutional knowledge of uniquely serving customers through products.) And customer support. (On going interaction with customers, hopefully leading to new transactions.) Because we can collaborate real-time, we can Google up the best resource at the best price (well, not really, but we think we can) and get the job done well enough. (hmm, really?)

So what does it mean to you? To get today's job, you have to do the work to make sure your name comes up on the top of the list of the search results, by hitting all the current transaction's requirements precisely. To the corporation, it diminishes and dilutes the effect of culture. (If culture is only "the way we do things around here", it becomes far more shallow and transactional in our instant-on-instant-off world where we cannot easily get to the deeper elements of culture, Shared Underlying Assumptions and Core Values. In a sense, there is no there there. No center. Not just because we are collaborating, but because the shift is now constant. Unplug from this, plug into that.

Now some have talked about building a Collaboration Culture but as near as I can see, this is only an idea. What we are often left with in a collaborative, outsourced world is a telephone answered by someone with perhaps the right information but no real expression of who the company is the customer is dealing with.

To illustrate this, let me use an "old world" example. In ancient days, perhaps 1990, if you purchased a product from Digital Equipment Corporation, you paid a premium for the product and for its service. But when you had a problem, you picked up the phone you could often eventually talk to somone who breathed that product and who had bought into the DEC's customer serice ethic. Contrast this with current customer support experiences in which the pleasant person on the other end of the telephone seems to have some authoritative information available, but expresses no recognizable values that would distinguish this experience for any other experience, and certainly does not espouse commitment toward achieving an experience with you that communicates those values. They just want to get you off the phone, or respond to your email.

The bad news, is this now is the corporation. We have outsourced virtually everything. So can we have a corporate culture in this environment? Or are we headed to the place where everything we do or make is subject to lowest price commoditization?

Or perhaps on a brighter note, how can we collaborate in such a way that we infuse every action with the underlying values that embody the organization being represented? How can we use our technology, our ability to tag everything in such a way that the values, not just information are transmitted with fidelity, no matter who is tasked today with delivering them?

the field of dreams problem

In my recent use of a couple of BC tools, I have been thinking a bit of what I call The Field of Dreams Problem. Named after a movie of the same title, I use this term refer to the key article of faith raised by that movie: If you build it, they will come. Recall that in the movie, Kevin Costner's character is driven by an inner voice to build a baseball diamond out in the middle of an Iowa cornfield, sure in the faith that if he built it, They Will Come.

To illustrate the core dynamic of the Field of Dreams problem in Business Collaboration, I would contrast two really different, but excellent tools Intranets.com and LinkedIn.com. I've come to think that each of these types of tools requires a different solution to The Field of Dreams Problem; solutions I call "Carrots" and "Sticks".

If you haven't seen it, yet, LinkedIn.com is probably the best business-focused social networking tool currently available. I am a heavy user of LinkedIn and have been amazed how its viral feel makes me want to use it more. The virtuous circle it creates spins energy that makes it easier and easier to use it more and more (at least at the beginning, or when you are motivated by a perceived immediate need to do business networking.) The benefits of being a part of this circle create the "Carrot" that you are trying to earn by using the tool. Now there are some real challenges with LinkedIn's approach that I think I'll write about at another time, particularly in its ability to keep engaged those who have the most to offer but who may perceive they have less to gain. But the bottom line is, for the average person, you want to use tools like LinkedIn more and more. You want the Carrot so you come back.

In contrast to LinkedIn, are solutions that require organizational legislation -- and this would include most of what we need to use to move toward George Pohle's definition of the On Demand "Future of Business". Getting people to jump aboard this type of solution requires "Sticks". You have to use this "or else". An excellent tool in this category is Intranets.com, which is a collaborative suite of online tools for document management, calendaring, scheduling, task management, web and audio conferencing, and database management. Most of us have at least one of these tools on our computers already, so there isn't too much individual burning desire out there to learn another one. These tools get used because someone legislates it. Otherwise, we'd use what we already know, largely out of habit.

From a dynamics point of view, the energy around these approaches is quite different: in one case, you want to use something more and more. In the other, you have to use it more and more. In terms of motivation for adoption of these different types of solutions, one is intuitive, the other cerebral. One individual, the other institutional. Both solve the Field of Dreams problem.