Enterprise collaboration: huge advances, some confusion
I have worked for the last eleven years on collaboration-related endeavors, working for early enabling vendors, exploratory startups and practitioners, and seen the field of collaboration go through a decisive evolution, from fuzzy-warm-feeling-term to widely adopted, hugely transformational product category. A balance after these years has to include:
- Huge advances – Not a buzzword any more, collaboration will be one of the most important IT concerns for 2008, and has fierce grass-root adoption at the consumer level;
- Confusion – Now that it’s proven as a valid concern, collaboration has been wrapped together with too many other concerns, specially some coming from the communications side, and it’s easy to lose perspective of what is real (collaboration) and what is fodder (the always-hyper-connected workforce, communicating in twenty different channels and modalities at the same time, and at the same time having time to collaborate productively).
Here goes a timed perspective, from my eyes and memory, of some of what has happened in these last eleven years.
1997 — Technical Collaboration… uhhh?
In late 1997, as a VP of Marketing for Starbase, I remember customers’ and media’s skepticism and resistance when we “audaciously” used the new term of technical collaboration to describe StarTeam; “Since when is source control a collaboration issue?”.
People who were not users, and did not “get” StarTeam, would look at the threaded discussions that were part of the product, and their eyes would glaze, trying to understand what the heck was a discussion doing in the middle of so much source code. Some times, we could tell those people “Look, you can tie together the source you produce and change, with your discussions and comments about it, then you can use those discussions as threads to understand changes”, and in one out of five cases people would get it.
The same would happen with tasks, project management, and other “superfluous” team collaboration mechanisms that were surfaced through the product’s user interface; people expected a technical product to be… well… technical, and “collaboration” was not something techies did. Then again, that was 1997, and “techies” were just coming out of generations of changing applications using COBOL, one copybook at a time… Perhaps all that was needed was time to go by?
2000 — Communities and Reputation Management
Fast-forward to 2000; collaboration had become hot, specially between developers. During a very short six months or so, I was assigned to try to help create one of the first hosted development environment for corporate and open source developers (yes, the two terms don’t make sense together, and that’s probably why it didn’t work out); the venture was a spin off Starbase, located in Scotts Valley.
Think about it, collective, hosted, collaborative development, all very progressive concepts, just at the dawn of open source… Who would say that collaboration had not arrived?
Just before jumping on board of the new venture, I had been dabbling with my friend Pierre on the issues of Communities and Reputation Management (through a couple of early community portals called VoteZone and Grapevine respectively, both of them experimenting with community and reputation management strategies, both of them piloting the user-centered approach to content that has now come to be called social networking).
In the process, I had become first seduced by the potential of massive collaboration portals, then nauseated by the asinine waste of energy produced by anonymity and large clouds or flaming bozos and robots, and finally elated by the capability of good reputation management to maximize the first by controlling the second; all that remained was just for massive collaboration (now called social networking) to start happening, and new wonderful things to evolve from it… It didn’t take a rocket scientist to understand that reputation management was a basic pre-requisite to civil behavior online, in the way to online virtual societies… Right?
So, I thought that it would be a good idea to bring reputation management into the hosted development environment… It just made so much sense, considering the social outlook of hosted collaborative development!
Did the acceptance of technical collaboration bring about tolerance and understanding for reputation management? Did social concepts pile up neatly as bricks, or did each brick need to be justified on its own? Did I succeed? You would think so, but you couldn’t be further from the truth if you tried.
I remember bringing Pierre to our offices, so that he could discuss with the two leading technologists in the company (let’s call them Jason and Jeff, to simplify)… J&J, bright and progressive as they were, two bright kids who believed themselves to be ahead of the pack as it related to collaboration, cooperation, and the social potential of the Internet, spent two hours fighting against the idea, and never gave themselves a chance to understand it.
It was a really sad meeting to attend: for Pierre and I, having experienced the power of reputation management first hand, the discussion was not about whether it made sense, it was just how to make it happen as fast as humanly possible; a total no-brainer! Anything else would be equal to a world where everybody uses the same mask, the same voice…
But J&J didn’t even want to understand what reputation management was about; collaboration was a sticky buzzword, anybody could see that it was a good thing, but nobody wanted to get into the details of how to enable it, and this reputation management thing sounded like it required true discipline and thinking… Collaboration couldn’t be that hard, could it?
In other words, collaboration had undergone a long journey, but only the buzzword had established itself as something that “made sense”. A few practitioners had developed working, vivid experiences, but they were at that point just anecdotal book material, stuff “that other people do”; nobody disputed the power of collaboration, but some people were still fired for trying to get it to work…
2005 — Communities, wikis and blog — The practitioners’ challenges
Another fast forward to 2005. As a brand-new consultant for a $1Bn software company, I am asked to put together a business initiative for a platform and business process to support a ”cloud” of external user communities (with a projected maximum number of over a hundred individual communities, most of them for users of a specific product, others clustered around specific industry issues important to the company’s customers).
The initiative was clearly articulated (I will summarize the most salient points in a separate posting), approved after 30 minutes of review by the executives… and then buried two or three levels below anybody who could give ANY meaning to the phrase “executive sponsorship”, the sine-qua-non of successful communities.
Not surprisingly, while buried, not much progress was made in the communities front; but a few things started happening in a parallel front, internal collaboration, where I was kept busy rolling out an internal R&D collaboration platform, using Atlassian’s Confluence wiki platform and Sharepoint.
Sputtering, with many vacillations, internal collaboration started to happen; many content structures and workflows were started, some of them dwindled, but some prospered, and soon the “breeze could be felt” as we moved towards the tipping point. Having been involved in several such projects in the previous few years, I must say that despite the lack of an internal collaborative culture, budgetary support or executive sponsorship, this tipping point came much faster, with fewer hiccups, and in an obviously more sustainable manner than previous ones, even when the preceding ones were better positioned in those three critical fronts (internal culture, resources and sponsorship).
Pure luck? Perhaps… After all, I always preferred to be lucky than good. But the key component, which was not there before, was the awareness about collaboration and web 2.0 on the part of the users, and a desire (almost an impatience) to give it a try. Collaboration had already sneaked into their collective subconscious, it wasn’t just something that could be done and was good, but rather something that was being done, and why shouldn’t they? I must clarify that I am not talking about a leading bunch of bleeding-edge developers of web 2.0 platforms, but rather average corporate developers, mostly developing database applications, and IT operations management tools: as representative a sample as can be asked of the median US developer population.
On the external collaboration front (communities), after months spent customizing JIVE Forums, doubtlessly the best community product available (and the one with the most robust reputation management functionality), so that it could manage hundreds of independent communities, things were still sputtering.
This was 2007, and I was asked to help revive the project; by then, ten years after we used “technical collaboration” at Starbase for the first time, and with collaboration shining always brighter and brighter, you could expect both projects (external and internal) to have been smooth sailing, mostly routine…After all, these are the times of collaboration, right?
Of course, you would be wrong again if you were too optimistic; but not by as much as before. Sure, “executive sponsorship” ended up becoming “lukewarm tolerance”; “hundreds” of communities shrunk to “a handful of very small groups” as soon as it became obvious that communities required corporate, executive and participant commitment; and most people didn’t even get it: just as I right this post, as an example, I got an email from somebody inside the company who has worked all along in the communities initiative, asking me to clarify –for the hundredth time in three years — when do people use a wiki, a blog, a forum, why, and what for…
Yes, it wasn’t as great as expected. But on the other hand, thousands of page views a day on the knowledge base, close to a hundred individual contributions a day to the wiki, healthy metrics in all communities, and such, meant that despite apathy, internal politics and lack of direction people who want to collaborate found a way to do it, once they had the right tools and infrastructure.
One thing is for a company to have a “friendly” environment, another totally different is for it to have a “collaborative” one. But one thing is certain: take a friendly environment, make a few good collaboration tools available, and some collaboration hotspots WILL appear. And they did: pockets of collaboration started happening, brewing and interacting amongst themselves; collaborations started taking place, and nobody was surprised when it happened (or, more critical yet, challenged because of it).
Nota Bene: On the subject of “friendly vs. collaborative“, I believe that one of the most insidious challenges faced by enterprise collaboration is that executives in “friendly-culture companies”, who know nothing about collaboration, somehow believe that people in their company already do collaborate (“After all, this the most friendly company I know”), and because they think so they quickly reject the idea of investing on it (more on this in another posting).
In any case, between 2005 and 2007 I saw collaboration become part of the workplace landscape; actual people, inside a normal, perhaps just slightly more conservative environment than could be expected in a large company, where using collaboration day in and out as intuitively as they would use a phone. Just something you do, and of course, something you want to do with the best tools possible.
In those three years, I also grew the realization that *enterprise* was more than just a qualifier for collaboration, that it is its own thing, something related to collaboration but not just a flavor of it (I will write about that later). I saw many companies going through the process of implementing collaboration inside the enterprise, collaborated with several of them, and realized that it was just a matter of time (actually, a year or two) before it became as accepted as email is today…
2008 – The target keeps moving
This year (i.e., 2008) should be a record-breaking year for collaboration; everywhere I turn, I talk to companies where collaboration is the next big roll-out, taking place *now*, in 2008.
Knowledge architects, managers and executives in companies that used to call me every few months trying to fetch new arguments and to convince themselves to get going, are now in advanced deployment of collaboration platforms and tools.
Collaboration went from niche activity (only for techies) to visionary business goal, to tolerated “fuzzy investment”, and it’s now entering the status of *basic need of all knowledge workers*. But somehow, in the process of becoming a standard fixture, it got a little fuzzier.
At first collaboration was about getting people to *work together* across geographic fractures, time zones and systems, *working together* was just that, sharing a few artifacts, creating temporarily permanent spaces where to contain the results of their work (even if it was a directory in a file server), looking at a common page together and calling it “state of things”.
Then, web 2.0 platforms such as forums (JIVE Community Server), blogs (WordPress), wikis (Confluence), social networks (Clearspace) started to hit, and collaboration started to be characterized by workspaces (permanenet or ad-hoc), “where” teams would collaborate (there is no real “where”, but it’s a “where” nonetheless), would create content together, discuss, enact simple workflows, log activities, perform simple GTD or small-group-agile-task-management, where attachments could be the report you were looking for, and you would find them by navigating a tag cloud, or by locating with some degree of effort the expert on that subject covered by that report, and so on.
The issue moved from what collaboration was to how to better combine all the different ways that knowledge workers do collaboration.
- Is it a blog, a forum, a wiki, a page, a portal or a database? YES
- Is it social, reputation driven, profile enabled, expert-locating, intranet, extranet or medianet? YES
- Is it work, is it play, is it conversation, is it social, or is it just a waste of time? YES
- Is it unified collaboration, unified communications, or unified collaboration and communications? YES
Not surprisingly, the soup is confusing. A ferocious hype storm, fed by the chance to reap a chunk of the trillion dollar telco market by reinventing (retro-inventing?) telephony as data, is now converging with the very legitimate running train of collaboration.
The results of this hype confluence is, of course, more hype, more confusion, people talking about huge stacks of software, servers, network components and telephony layers as if they were a system (which they are not, they are just a soup of systems, but not organic in the sense that telephony has learned how to be).
Not surprisingly, early adopters will be burnt severely because of their optimism, but in the whole nobody cares, because the hype storm is raging.
It is dangerous for collaboration, a market that has grown slowly for so many years, solely because of its own merits (there were no IBM’s, Microsoft’s and Ciscos pushing wikis or collaboration up to 2006, were there?). It is dangerous because it is been attached to grandiose big-bang visions of complete technology stacks that go from the hardware all the way to the apps actual people use, and in all directions in the organization, to encompass all activities they conduct today (or may dream to conduct in the future).
Grandiose, all-encompassing visions are usually the fruit of megalomaniac egos (personal or corporate), just another twist in the world domination fantasy. Those small groups that laboriously, sometimes almost clandestinely, managed to create collaboration hot-spots, may see them extinguish as many IT drones fall under the seduction of “automatically managed presence”, “VoIP network self-optimization” and the like, and those drones start implementing pervasive and intrusive communication channels that few people need across all layers, start intertwining them with back-office applications (so that you can now have the immense pleasure of talking to a voice enabled server to try to explain to it that your access to some system is blocked), start bothering the hell out of everyone in the name of collaboration.
But it could be good, also, if communications modalities that people do use get seamlessly integrated into their collaboration workspaces. After all, clicking on my name where it appears under a posting of mine on a wiki, to send me a message immediately, seems to make sense, doesn’t it? It could be good if those that have not even given a chance to collaboration (those that reply with an email to a voice message 
all of the sudden find themselves doing it, not even knowing they are doing the collaboration thing.So, it’s confusion time. The right ingredients are there for hugely successful collaboration efforts, and also for huge failures (which will probably be blamed on the “inmaturity of collaboration” when boards need heads to chop after them).
Considering how much is at stake, I’ve decided I will start writing more posting about this issue, hopefully one a day, to try to clarify my own confusions and in the process help somebody as well. For now, let’s leave it at this precariously optimistic point, where eleven years of trying to enable and foster collaboration seem to start bearing fruit…
This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 13th, 2008 at 6:55 pm and is filed under UC, UCC, enterprise collaboration, web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.