Tuesday 6 October 2009

My Thoughts on, "Collaboration: know your enthusiasts and laggards", article from Cisco

Last week I spent some time reading an excellent and very interesting piece from Cisco, "Collaboration: know your enthusiasts and laggards".

I encourage you take a look at the results of the study Cisco undertook into the factors linked to successful adoption of collaboration via networked tools: instant messaging, wikis, shared workspaces, video conferencing, forums and discussion boards etc.

Whilst reading their interesting findings a couple of things struck me.

On page one of the article was the sentence,

"You can use the study results to maximize your return on investment from collaboration tools. One way is to implement business practices shown to lead to more enthusiastic collaboration."

This struck me as possibly being another way of saying: if you have already purchased tools to allow collaboration you can enjoy a return on that investment by putting in place an environment which will encourage collaboration using these tools. Please correct me if I'm wrong but this sounds a little too close to the assumption that collaborating is an end in itself, not a means to an end.

To my mind, collaboration is very important in many walks of life and many types of organisations can benefit from doing a lot more of it. Some of it will come via software; much of it should come through face-t0-face chats, discussions and more formal meetings. None of it will, I think, lead to a return on investment in and of itself. If I asked a CEO how their business was doing in these hard times, I wouldn't expect them to say, "We're doing well, we're collaborating so much more than before."

For me, the key to a return on investment from collaboration is controlling that collaboration. Knowing what the business goals and objectives are and making a conscious decision to use collaboration as a technique to help achieve them. Also important is the monitoring of the collaboration taking place and then linking the collaboration efforts to the outcomes of the collaboration.

Collaboration can have a very specific goal, "We have a project to deliver and two teams in different cities need to collaborate, in these ways, to successfully deliver that project."

Collaboration can be less concrete, but no less valuable, "We have a group of people over here, and another group over there, who would benefit from talking more and understanding each other - their jobs, their day to day issues and how they go about solving them. We're not sure what will exactly come from this but we will set up collaborative spaces, monitor them, get feedback from the collaborators, and look at how these groups do their jobs one month, three months, six months, after the collaboration was established. We'll then analyse how collaboration contributed to getting a, b, and c done, learn from the experience and build on it.

Rather than saying, "We collaborate therefore we succeed", I'd like to be able to say, "We had a business need, problem or corporate goal, we put a number of collaboration techniques in place and we achieved our goals or fixed our problems. We also saw where and how our collaboration contributed to our success."

Collaboration is a tool to use to achieve an objective, not an end in itself. Return on investment comes from what results from collaboration, not from collaboration alone.

For many people and organizations the goal should be to achieve results through targeted collaboration, not to just collaborate more.

I hope we all succeed because we know how to collaborate, we know why we're doing it, we know what we get from it, and we know how it contributes to our goals and objectives.

Ian

Monday 5 October 2009

Accessing Useful Knowledge: musings from a train carriage

Sitting on a train, slowly trundling through Hertfordshire, my thoughts turned to the challenges of knowledge and information sharing.

I was minding my own business, surrounded by other similar people, also minding their own business and I started to think that if I had a need for knowledge and information, what would be my best course of action? What would be the most efficient and effective way to obtain, share and distribute information and knowledge?

Pondering this question produced some interesting thoughts.

If I needed a particular newspaper, document or magazine article, that I'd forgotten to bring along with me, my best bet was to stand up, forget I was English, and ask my fellow travelers whether anyone had a copy. A long shot I know, but a direct request for specific information was my best chance.

On the other hand, if I had a less structured knowledge and information need what would work best?

If I wanted to exchange information and knowledge regarding how to get people to share their knowledge in a work environment, and how to persuade them, "not to panic" and convince them that knowledge sharing, "is a good thing", my best bet is not to ask a specific question out loud, or to call, tweet, or email the people in the carriage. My best bet is to try to get a conversation going between all the people in the train carriage.

Back in the real world, persuading a bunch of strangers to talk to each other on a train is only going to happen if the train grinds to a halt and all the lights go out - otherwise, forget it.

However, the thought emphasised for me that often the best means of communication is face-to-face. The best way to exchange knowledge and information in order to meet a range of needs is to get a group of people to sit in the same physical space, and with a clear idea of the boundaries and objectives of the meeting, to talk to each other in the real world.

Other forms of more distanced communication, email, phone, etc have their place and are very popular and useful, but in this world of technology let's not lose track, let's not forget, that having a discussion with a real person is often the best way to communicate.

Ian

Search Solutions 2009

I recently attended the Search Solutions 2009 one day conference. For an excellent summary of a very interesting day take a look at Karen's recent blog post

For me, 'a star of the show' was Dave Mountain's enthralling discussion, "Location-Based Services: Positioning, Geocontent and Location-Aware Applications". Dave looked at location based services, their current uses and future possibilities. One aspect, which sparked heated debate over coffee, was the very real security implications of having your position pinpointed to a couple of metres. Location Based Services will I think continue to grow and meld together with social applications such as Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, e-commerce and mobile devices. We will increasingly know where the nearest coffee shop is to our location in terms of direct route, time taken to get there etc. Add to this the possibility that everyone else will know where you are in real time and what you're doing and you have a world of many information and privacy challenges. I wonder whether we'll end up with people paying a surcharge to cloak themselves from all this information gathering?

If you want to know more about the world of Geocontent and Location Aware Applications Dave Mountain is a great person to talk to.

Ian

This post was previously posted on Taxonomy Watch