At the recent Enterprise Connect conference the incessant recurring theme of "collaboration" interrupted a lot of important conversations about communications. Webster's defines collaborate as a means to work jointly with others or together, especially in an intellectual endeavor. Big deal, that's what we’ve been doing at the office for years. There lies the epiphany, "at the office." It seems once again, the notion of mobility changes everything.
"At work" now refers to a state or condition rather than a place. People don’t telecommute or telework anymore, they just work where they are. It's just work. And this shift, which is normally associated with increased productivity, poses a few challenges easily overcome, but can result in disaster if neglected. For example, paperwork or signatures can be a real bottleneck for highly distributed organizations. This can be solved though with a variety of technologies including electronic workflow and e-signature solutions.
Not long ago, not being in the office (hours, days, weeks) was a valid excuse for work flow disruptions. Faxes would sit unread, paper unprocessed or signed, meetings delayed, presentations missed. It certainly wasn't great, but it was an unavoidable reality, like a sick day. Somewhere along the way, during VoIP, UC, and recession; the norm changed. The single most important communications imperative today is effective distributed collaboration. We live in a knowledge economy, and the knowledge isn’t coming to the office anymore.
Collaboration is another of those slippery nebulous terms that people like to use despite a lack of popular clarity of meaning (e.g. unified communications). At a minimum, some vendors position audio conferencing or even whiteboarding as collaboration tools. Presence isn't new, it used to be an in/out magnetic board. In fact, many UC tools are rapidly becoming collaboration tools. The current buzz of collaboration is just an evolution of enterprise communications; the telephone, voice mail, email, IM, and videoconferencing are all tools to collaborate.
The new power tool of collaboration is desktop and document sharing. Look through your email, your to-do list, and your call history--who are you working with? There is a good chance that key and frequent colleagues are not in the same building, city, state, or even country. The state of work is increasingly distributed, and the workflow and communication tools need to adapt.
Changes in the technology landscape shifted remote collaboration into the feasible category. In the past few years; broadband networking became widely available and deployed, advances and ubiquity in mobile devices (iPads, notebooks, and smartphones) provide the horsepower, and corporate technologies (databases, applications, and APIs) are far easier to access remotely.
The cloud also changes the game. Even for organizations with mainframes, services such as Dropbox, Amazon Cloud Drive, Box.net, and Huddle.com facilitate moving and sharing information (dematerialization of the floppy disk). Various cloud services are redefining the capabilities and expectations of remote collaboration--services like Google Docs and Skype enable collaboration for free. Yammer.com and IBM’s hosted version of Connections offer social networking solutions that extend beyond corporate boundaries. Microsoft is expected to soon launch hosted Office with improved sharing and collaboration capabilities.
Social norms also now embrace geographic freedom and acceptance of electronic tethers. 37Signals, the maker of Basecamp and other hosted productivity tools facetiously announced (for April Fools) their intent to eliminate remote working. "If we demand 99.9% uptime from our servers, we should demand that amount of productivity from our employees too. To that end, everyone will work in our kitchen, sitting around a big table. This will make it harder for any team member to slip into 'lazy mode' on Facebook, Reddit, Hacker News, or Twitter."
Collaboration requires the dematerialization of whatever is critical. Luckily the list of things possible to dematerialize continues to grow; music, books, videos, various forms of paperwork including invoices, presentations, reference material, blueprints, X-rays, tickets, etc. The promise of the paperless office, or at least paperless workflow, is still somewhat futuristic, but has never been closer. Converting paper processes to electronic processes is not trivial. It took the airlines nearly a decade to switch to paperless tickets.
Collaboration can be one at a time (serial workflow) or involve many people simultaneously. The goal is, get the knowledge to flow. Knowledge flows used to form in conference rooms or even around water coolers--physical locations where workers could gather and discuss ideas. Constructive energy develops as different point of views contribute to solving a problem. Ideas get refined over an iterative out-loud process. The resulting solution or idea(s) is greater than any one person’s contribution. This cycle of human interaction is not easily accomplished with serial collaboration tools such as email.
Simply distributing a workforce can stifle knowledge flows as communications become more deliberate (even bureaucratic). The opportunity now lies in creating virtual communities for collaboration within the enterprise--as is already happening externally with social networks, blogs, and other online venues. This is why voice is less emphasized than before--it's still critical, but the phone still works the way it did--the crucial gap lies with its inability to convey non-verbal communication.
The new thrust around collaboration isn’t due to a technical breakthrough, but rather a social one. Technologies need to be adapted and repackaged. What makes collaboration so compelling is It represents the nexus of unified communications, the cloud, mobility, consumerization, and social networks. Collaboration is the goal--the benefactor and true underwriter of the hottest technology trends in communications today.
