My wife says, "It's a phase we have to go through." Yeah, right. When did our daughter discover boys? I'm not complaining about technology and I'm not denying the collaborative need between humans. I simply don't want boys around my daughter.
What Melanie didn't mention in her post Collaboration Makes Us Human is that humans do communicate in varied capacities with other humans. That scale can climb above or dive below simple/complex reasoning skills, visual and verbal cues and tones and reflections. How complicated can it be? Melanie's post got me thinking because chimps do understand primal visual and audible cues, as should a young man should approaching the front porch of my daughter's home seeing gorilla Dad shaking his head no way.
While I don't want my daughter holding a cell phone up near her undeveloped brain--I didn't mind the idea of an iPod Touch. Besides, if she wants an iPhone, she can ante up and pay for the subscriber costs of the data plan. I even advised her to consider that the iPod Touch may get axed and buying an iPhone may be the better thing to do; she still opted for the iPod Touch. This is a proud moment for me because my daughter worked during the summer caring for a neighbor's dog and continues to do so weekdays after school. She also opted for best price for a commodity product, meaning she walked away from Apple's Store and purchased from Amazon. After my wife and I schemed and weighed the pros/cons, we thought, okay this is a much better option than her spending money on an iPhone.
The small brown light package arrived and it was a shining moment to see my daughter so happy. "Your work has earned you this really nice...." In the past Dad was supportive in the role of tech support. Not today. After school she completed her job and jumped on the opportunity to synch her new iPod Touch with her Mac Mini. No need to get help from Dad. Of course, this is another proud yet bittersweet moment, because I'm thinking back to the days when she was 3-1/2 years old and I gave her a Mac Tangerine for Christmas. After we slowed the mouse tracking down she quickly adapted to the Mac and the ongoing supply of educational games. Here we are today and she's independent and confident with Dad on the sidelines feeling like his supportive mouse tracking days are left in the dust.
A few hours later I decided to check in with my daughter because I thought I heard her talking to someone. She seemed glowing and I thought this must be really special to have an iPod Touch. I've never held one, so she let me examine her new i-device. Safari, Mail, Weather, and FaceTime--all need WiFi access so I voluntarily keyed in the access code hinting at a chargeable monthly fee that she quickly disputed. I noticed some other apps--Skype, Games and before I could browse further, "Who is this texting you!" All those proud moments seemed to vaporize as more messages arrived. "Oh that's so and so, and this message--he’s just a pest." Music to my ears but my wife warned me later, "Don't be so gullible."
Getting back to communications and collaboration--it really is the basic stuff that we all do every day willingly or unwillingly. Our effectiveness depends upon our abilities to be good communicators, use proper tools and methods at our disposal that we are organizationally empowered to use.
The interesting twist in all this is how enterprises can effectively use communications and collaboration to improve their bottom lines, gain efficiencies, improve customer relations and retain employees.
Empowering employees is always a management concern and even with limits or controls embedded within the organization; employees always find a way around, over, under or some workaround when it means getting their jobs done.
When technology easily blends into the hands of users with little or no effort, then there’s something to be said for this kind of delivery. I've long maintained that enterprise communications is too complex and so are many of the technology solutions. As the PC disappears seemingly faster than the desktop telephone, I can't help but chuckle. What is so appealing about watching movies, reading books and documents and exercising all forms of communications on an i-device? Whatever it is, "it" needs to be replicated and this kind of mojo is what Microsoft and many other companies just don't have. Of course, I'm plugging Apple, but not without some merit.
Whether or not anyone planned using technology to "make us more human" I don’t know. What I do know is, how we use the technology can still present obstacles and land mines. IT wants to maintain the gate keeping, just like I want to maintain gorilla blockades to boys bold enough to grace my driveway with their presence. Animal instinct to protect the clan is primal, but I'd question the same of most daily business communications and collaboration.
For decades, management experts have studied, debated and focused in on Japan and now China. Their societies' communications and collaboration styles show that their cultures act less individually than ours and remain more focused on the collective or group dynamics than we do, with our focus on individualism or independence. This remains a key challenge in the American workplace. People working in the same company are often at odds and seemingly on different teams. Maybe it's human nature, but I think it has something to do with how the workplace stage is set by management to foster and nurture individual accomplishments focused on individual performance evaluations. This contributes to the competitive issues people encounter while working for the same company with common goals and objectives.
For enterprises that do gain the right mix or mojo in communications and collaboration, I think they will excel. How? Here's a basic example. Whenever I contact support for anything--how to program the router, how much fertilizer to use for plants or how to assemble something just purchased, there's almost always a gap in the process. First I wouldn't call if I could readily find a clear answer. Then when I do call and the employee knows the process and knows that the "instructions" are flawed or inadequate, then why isn't that employee empowered to make or facilitate a change? When the employee offers a fix and states that a simple change will resolve your issue, then why hasn't management implemented this simple change? Another way to examine this is, does the process lend itself to continuous improvement?
Now let me give you a working example of a company that is exercising the right mix in communications and collaboration. A few weekends ago, we migrated all our Macs and one new Mac to Apple LION OS. Before we could implement the change, the virtual machines using Parallels had to be upgraded first. In testing Parallels on one machine, Microsoft's Live Messenger video chat stopped working using the built in iSight camera. I opened up a case with Parallels on September 8th spent 4 hours on the phone with first level support to conclude that the issue needed escalation. Then on September 10th I received a call to work on the issue with someone in escalation. We worked three hours testing, checking, and the technician remotely reviewed my configuration. He concluded the issue must go to the software development team, and I received a request from that team on September 11th. I was able to reply to their request by testing some other apps on the virtual machine the next day. The next couple of days, I received updates from Parallels via email that they were working on this issue for resolution. On September 15th I received an email instructing me to download an update and that the fix is now posted in the Parallels knowledge base (KB) under Article 112234.
So that's an example of when it works. Too often, the failure to improve or ensure continuous improvement is caused by our inability to communicate across boundaries within organizations and to employ change, resolving issues and improving performance. While better communications and collaboration isn't always guaranteed to resolve the real issue, our inability to effectively communicate or collaborate certainly doesn't improve performance or expectations throughout the value chain.
In short, the combined efforts of UC should be delivered just like my daughter's iPod Touch. I've argued before that an IP/SIP phone delivered without UC is akin to buying a new car without its fluids. Lucky for me, she doesn't need a phone company or even a data plan. As long as she has WiFi she has everything else--phone, video, email, web browsing, music, photos and an endless supply of apps available as needed, when wanted.
It will be challenging for enterprises to improve and encourage group performance and dynamics that go against the current focus on individual performance. I think there are remaining obstacles and more lessons that management has yet to deal with. While I’m not interested in opening lines of communications with any "stinky boys," I am interested in listening and learning what I can do willingly and still be reasonable. What enterprise can’t afford to do is forget collaboration, because without it the communications stands to get marginalized or simply less effective and too costly.
I remember, a few decades ago, the push to flatten out the organization. As successful as it was, large enterprises still failed on the account of collaboration and still do today. Dealing with a large company can be akin to dealing with the government. Employees need to be able to cross borders set by management within the organization. Communications transactions are communications between two or more people, and most problems occur when our transactions fail. As organizations deploy UC, they need to understand how to effectively use and train staff to understand the communications process between humans, and a great place to start is by examining Berlos SMCR (Sender-Message-Channel-Receiver) model.
As Melanie said, "The move toward greater collaboration may be simply the natural state of human interactions." Yet management of some organizations creates more barriers for people to communicate and collaborate more humanely. Anyone calling cable and phone companies or other call centers can attest to this. I may be using a dated term, "call center," and if the term is more appropriately "contact center," then how much more careful must customers be handled, with different methods of communication.
The jury is out on my daughter's use of technology but I will readily admit she got everything she wanted and we thought we did too.
Parallels as a company adopted both communications and collaboration to improve their business delivery of software and support to their customers. The entire process was natural and unimpeded. My issue wasn't resolved by pleas for help to customer service or the CTO or CEO of Parallels, or going through a painful internal process. It was fast and efficient, leaving me with the sense this is the kind of company I want on my side when I need help. It isn’t about throwing out products and services or monetizing on some new sales strategy. Probably more complicated than the technology because management may need to get out of the way or at least loosen the grip.
