I've been thinking about "collaboration" a lot lately, as it has become an important part of the Unified Communications conversation. The enterprise UC vendors have been throwing about the term collaboration for the past few years as an extension of or even a replacement of UC, but I think it’s important to note that it's really "collaborative communications" that they're talking about.
People have been collaborating for centuries (the cave dwellers probably collaborated on making fire), and many businesses got their start based on collaboration at a bar using a pencil and cocktail napkin. When our UC industry talks about collaboration, we’re really talking about collaborative communications--i.e., the use of communication tools to enable physically distributed individuals and groups to work together in order to produce a business goal or result.
The concept of collaboration gets tricky when we start talking about Unified Communications and Collaboration (UC&C). As shown in the slide below from my UC Market Overview presentation, I've long believed that collaboration (which includes collaborative tools such as conferencing and shared workspaces) is one of the elements that make up a UC solution, along with other selected elements such as presence, mobility, call control, messaging, etc.
For the most part, collaboration is really the driving force behind the UC value proposition and ROI of many UC-U justifications such as reducing travel expenses, and office space, as well as UC-B applications, with improvements in time to market, product development, or sales cycles because of the ability to collaborate. But lately, due to the way it's being marketed by various vendors, collaboration has become a separate entity from UC.
Regardless of the term used--UC, UC&C, collaborative communications, or just collaboration, it's important to understand what collaboration is really about.
Many vendors and other commentators have made collaboration synonymous with conferencing, but collaboration is much more than that. Like UC, collaboration is not a single product and it includes a variety of tools and elements to facilitate the processes that enable today’s distributed way of working, including: voice and text-based communications, voice/web/video conferencing, social software, document and work sharing tools, and more. Some of these tools have been around for a while and some are relatively new, but they all are adapting to today's distributed nature of work.
Many, if not most, UC and collaborative communication solutions require a level of integration. The integration can be between the various technology elements and/or with business processes and applications. Integration makes it possible to view someone's presence status from within a CRM application or Twitter or Facebook, and have the ability to seamlessly click to conference and initiate a document sharing and whiteboarding session, for example. While we're not there yet, this is clearly where things are heading. Collaboration should not be a silo.
I believe that the greatest value of collaborative communications will be in expanding our reach beyond the enterprise. Of course there are huge productivity improvements when individuals, teams and workgroups can work together in shared workspaces using their UC and collaboration tools to foster business processes. But imagine when this concept is extended so companies can seamlessly collaborate with their customers, suppliers, partners, and others using a blend of public and private, cloud and premise solutions.
For example, I often use Twitter as a way to ask questions and get information, using the vast network of connections that make up the "Twitterverse." I recently posted a general tweet asking for suggestions about how to sync my iPad with my email service. Wouldn't it be nice if, when someone tweets back a response, we can have a collaborative session where we can talk via a simple click-to-call button, and share documents and even videos related to my question, and bring in other people to join the discussion? Of course there are security issues that come into play, but that will have to be covered in another article.
