Michael Sampson responds to my post on collaboration

I have the privilege of knowing and interacting with Michael Sampson, a true collaboration expert based out of New Zealand. I made a recent post called: "what exactly is collaboration and who owns it?" In the article I suggested that speaking of some amorphous entity called 'collaboration' could actually be unhelpful and counterproductive. As such I also suggested splitting the space up into a number of different sub-categories, which are:

• Messaging centric collaboration
• Content centric collaboration
• Conversation centric collaboration
• Process centric collaboration
• Collaborative management

The original article garnered a couple of interesting comments. However Michael felt the need to respond on his blog, as he does not agree with my way of slicing and dicing the amorphous blob.

I heartily recommend reading Michael's response by clicking on this link. I will quote Micheal directly, but in summary so as not to just repeat the whole content of his article here. So, Michael says:

"....I think the distinction between the five isn't tight enough, and leaves too much overlap. For example, if I hold a "conversation" with my "geographically dispersed team" via email, I'm doing "conversation-centric" via "messaging centric". The conversation is happening, but we're collaborating via messaging tools"

This is fair enough, of course you can have a 'conversation' by batting email back and forth. It might not be the best way to do it, but it does not make it any less valid. He goes on to say:

"I prefer to slice and dice in the following ways, and as I'll outline in a moment, the majority of Jed's five sub-categories fall into the team collaboration one:
- Team Collaboration ... for a team working towards a deliverable.
- Group Collaboration ... for a group that shares a common interest or practice.
- Organizational Collaboration ... for creating opportunities to collaborate.

I advocate this approach because it separates the discussion of intent and scenario from any particular collaboration technology.

And therein lays the rub - I cannot disagree that my way of dividing up collaboration is somewhat technology centric. I don't think I meant it to be when I first considered it, and I could still argue if I really wanted to that 'messaging' is not necessarily about email software, but Michael's point about overlap is just too valid. I also have to admit that I don't have all of his years of experience in this space, and I do have a technical (systems administration) background which appears to have given me a technology based bias to my approach.

So the key element of Michael's way of looking at the conundrum is his last sentence, the separation of intent and the context of any specific scenario from the technologies used to enable collaboration in that particular scenario. He is taking a business oriented, organizational viewpoint, which makes sense when we talk about who owns collaboration.

Michael then turns his attention to this question, which I touched on at the end of my article. He points to an earlier blog posting of his own: "Who owns collaboration at your firm?" and quite rightly suggests that we should read it, and the comments. However Michael is still fleshing out his ideas on collaboration governance for his next book. I am looking forward to that read.

However the best thing is, Michael called me on the phone all the way from New Zealand (I am in Canada!) because he wanted a quick chat to make sure I would not be completely devastated when he disagreed with my article - what a star ! :-)

The whole point of blogging for me is to maybe provoke some thought here and there, and to get into interesting conversations like this one. I can only agree that my definitions are somewhat loose, overlapping and technology centric - however hopefully given those caveats, they may still be useful in some scenarios and perhaps can sit alongside Micheal's organizational model, and others. Also, once again we prove the worth of social networking !

Really though, you would think I would know better having read both of his books........ :-)

You should follow Michael on Twitter where he has the handle 'collabguy' - and Micheal thanks for calling, I thoroughly enjoyed our chat !!

(article edited on 5th of Feb to get the spelling of Michael right !!)

What exactly is 'collaboration' - and who owns it ?

This article is mostly prompted by internal discussions within my group at work, but also because I have been reading Prof. Andrew MacAfee's book on Enterprise 2.0. Also in the bigger picture it links back to some posts from late last year on the TiMAF definition of information and information management, because your definition of what constitutes collaboration will impact on who the 'owners' are.

To set a little context, we have been taking about business ownership models for SharePoint (MOSS 2007) in our organization. Our CIO is very much focused on IT providing a service to the business and as such we always look for the 'business sponsor' or 'business owner'. For SharePoint specifically this an issue due to its both its broad feature set, and in no small way due to the Microsoft marketing which depicts it as a tool which 'the business' can use with a lot of help from IT.

So how about splitting up SharePoint's major features does that help? Well it may do, because it might be fairly easy to find the business sponsor for records management functionality, or for business intelligence features. I suppose document management might be more difficult to find a single owner because of its broad scope, unless you have an ECM strategy which in turn has a business owner/sponsor.

Collaboration however is a much more nebulous beast. What exactly constitutes collaboration may change depending on the organization or even the circumstances, and who might want to stand up as the business owner of something so ephemeral ?

At the Open University 'collaboration' was part of our ECM programme, but to be honest that was only collaborative workspaces, wikis, blogs etc not the 'communications' tools such as the Exchange email servers which belonged to a well established group. However we did 'own' collaboration to the extent that we wrote the collaboration strategy, and guidelines on which tools should / could be used for which collaborative endeavours. However as ECM Programme Manager I was also 'co-owner' of our corporate intranet, and in many organizations Corporate Communications (or whomever else) might step up and take the collaboration space because of its links to the intranet. On the other side of the coin I have worked as a consultant with Corp. Comms executives who vehemently insisted that any form of collaboration tool, web based or not, was well outside of their remit.

Throw in newer collaboration related 'phenomena' such as Enterprise 2.0 and things can get even more complicated. Prof. McAfee suggested in a recent post that overusing the word 'social' was a great way to kill your E2.0 initiatives before they even get started (make sure you read all the comments to get the full discourse). Those who decry “social this and social that” as over use of an empty buzz word seem to have forgotten the reason collaboration is so important is because we are social animals, and we like to work together (there are of course sound evolutionary reasons for this !).

So at this point I would suggest that part of the solution is to accept that there is no such thing as single amorphous blob labeled as collaboration – but many contextually different elements to collaboration, each of which may lend itself to a different type of technology or tool, to a different type of management, and even to a different loci for 'ownership'. As a starting point, lets look at the Wikipedia definition of collaboration:

“Collaboration is a recursive process where two or more people or organizations work together in an intersection of common goals — for example, an intellectual endeavor that is creative in nature—by sharing knowledge, learning and building consensus.” (click for the full definition)

If we then acknowledge that we must concentrate on people, process, content and context for successful collaboration, and that dividing collaboration into synchronous or asynchronous is too simplistic, how else might we categorize or collaborative endeavors towards our common goals?

The following five sub-categories are my suggestion for slicing and dicing it to help it make sense:

Messaging Centric Collaboration: The lowest common denominator or fall back position for many, this category includes not only the use of email for collaboration (with all the bad practice this entails, such as large CC lists and attachments) but also Instant Messaging and SMS texting tools.

Content Centric Collaboration: Working together to create or edit a particular item (or items) of information. A good example is the Document Library centred approach of MOSS 2007, where the discussion forum, project blog or even the wiki is used to provide collaboration around the creation of content in MS Office formatted ‘documents’. Other ECM or DM products generally support this mode of collaboration through commenting directly on documents etc.

Conversation Centric Collaboration: The focus is not any particular content item, but instead on free flowing, creative discussions, often between geographically dispersed teams or individuals. Also often used in a ‘knowledge management’ focused scenario, tools might include blogs, wikis and instant messaging.

Process Centric Collaboration: Enhancing a particular production process workflow by adding a collaborative element. This may include discussion with teams or individuals up or downstream in the process workflow, or the collaborative brainstorming of issues causing exceptions in the process etc. For example in the EMC Documentum workflow tools there was a feature that would automatically create an eRoom workspace, assign users to it and email them a message with a link to the workspace and information on the process exception !

Collaborative Management: The co-ordination of programs, projects or processes via collaborative interaction, for example using team workspaces, team calendars and collaborative project management tools.

My colleague Martin White, Managing Director of Intranet Focus likes these definitions (we used them when working together for the UN Secretariat) and he uses them with his clients. As I publish on this blog under a Creative Commons license, feel free to use them too - but this leads to my first question to any readers who would like to comment:

Does this way of splitting 'collaboration' into constituent parts look helpful to you ?

My second question links back to my mention of our internal discussions:

Who is the 'business owner' of collaboration in your organization ?

What is an Intranet anyway ?

A question I ask (and intend to answer) in response to a posting by Shiv Singh on the AppGap blog entitled 'Intranets are not just intranets anymore'.

I am not going to regurgitate Shiv's posting, but I would suggest you go take a look at it. So what do you consider to be an 'intranet' ?

A good place to start is with the wikipedia definition:

"An intranet is a private computer network that uses Internet protocols and network connectivity to securely share any part of an organization's information or operational systems with its employees. Sometimes the term refers only to the organization's internal website, but often it is a more extensive part of the organization's computer infrastructure and private websites are an important component and focal point of internal communication and collaboration." It is acually quite a long page, so you can read it all here.

Interestingly, my opinion on what an intranet is goes back to when I first started in IT, and I would have summarised it as "a private internet" too. Anything that uses internet protocols including HTTP, DNS etc

However it has become apparent to me that many people still consider the 'intranet' to be the "internal website". For some reason they do not consider all the other applications as being a part of the intranet, they just think of the 'corporate home' or news pages as provided by a commercial or home grown CMS. If we take the bigger picture as espoused by the Wikipedia definition though, it opens up the world to an 'intranet ecosystem' which may include your;

• Information published in the form of web pages via a CMS
• Browser based interfaces to document management systems, your CRM system, your ERP's systems enterprise applications,
  
• Browser based query and reporting interfaces to your data wharehouse, operational management systems, strategic planning systems, dashboards and scorecards et al
• Browser based access to workspaces, and various other 'collaboration' tools

It's all part of the intranet, and so in my opinion when we start to look at Enterprise 2.0 or Intranet 2.0 in particular, i.e. the use of tools and concepts such as blogs, wikis, commenting, user generated content - anything that addresses the original Andrew McAfee SLATES or Dion Hinchcliffe FLATNESSES acronyms - then questions such as 'do we put this in Sharepoint or put it on the intranet' or 'do we use a wiki for this, or do we put it on the intranet' are slightly misplaced. The questions should become those of integration and navigation, of how you craft your information architecture and modify your navigation schemas to take the new tools into account, and of how your governance structures need to change to deal with the new concepts.

Where 'Cloud computing' fits i.e. integrating external, beyond the firewall applications into an existing intranet is another complex, but intrinsically linked question.

Shiv gets really interesting though, when he suggests the intranet might have grown beyond the browser. Using desktop widgets, built using the likes of Adobe AIR or MS Silverlight, we can have Rich 'Intranet' Applications (RIA) that don't need a browser. As noted in a comment on Shiv's posting, less than a year ago I had a serious conversation about using 'Outlook as a portal' - levering MS Outlook's messaging, task management and calendering, with add on's such as integrated RSS reader (now a standard feature of Outlook 2007), the Documentum Client for Outlook (many ECM suites provide an Outlook client) and integration with MS Live Communications server. In the end we did not progress this train of thought. Would it work? Maybe, in an organisation with an MS centric desktop infrastructure.

So what do you think ? You can check out many Intranet 2.0 themed postings by Toby Ward at www.intranetblog.com and even better, you can take part in Prescients Intranet 2.0 survey and help us build the body of research.

Also the slides for 'Intranet 2.0: the future of intranets' are available on Slideshare.net, this is a sneak preview of Toby's session at the Jboye08 conference in Denmark.

Chuck Hollis on Social Media

I don't know if your aware of Chuck Hollis of EMC, I have been reading his 'external' o r 'main' blog for sometime, but having followed a link from there, I came across his 'other' blog: A Journey In Social Media - this is fascinating stuff taking the reader along with Chuck as he leads the move to instill social media awareness and use within the worlds sixth biggest software company.

If your not aware of 'A Journey.....' I suggest you go right back to the beggining and follow the story through. What is really interesting in our own internal context is the early postings on EMC's use of its own eRoom's product - one colleague suggesting we lift the text of one posting and make it our 'eRoom usage policy' :-) (p.s. Chuck - we haven't done this !)

I have to say I am happy that we seem to have foreseen most, if not all of the issues Chuck notes, and put policy in place to prevent them. However our use of eRooms is for 'content centric' collaboration (linked to Documentum Content Server) or the more traditional eRoom 'project management' use case, and definately not the social media 'conversational collaboration' use case that Chuck is looking to spread.

I noticed some other postings which themselves suggested the amount of postings about 'collaboration' seem to be on the increase, thus it must be a trendy, or hot topic. Now I know there are arguements that humans have been collaborating since we discovered fire and developed language, but I also think we can't deny that the new 'social networking' dimension and the various "Web 2.0 / Enterprise 2.0" tools bring some new elements to the mix, and I like Chucks definition of "conversational collaboration" - perhaps its time for a "Collaboration Maturity Model" (oh no, another CMM, only kidding....!) :

Messaging Centric Collaboration (eMail / IM) -> Content Centric Collaboration (DM / ECM) -> Conversation Centric Collab (forums / blogs / wikis)


Chuck's team decided to go with Jive Software's Clearspace - an excellent product by all due accounts, but not one I think we could afford, so whilst we don't get the benefits of the integration, we are developing 'skins' for our internal WordPress, MediaWiki and PHPForums systems to give as common a user experience as we can.

Interesting times

So it all started with a quick session of blog reading last night, and a comment by my friend Laurence over on Word of Pie; he quite rightly, and very gently takes me to task for being a tad cynical in a previous posting. However, although I am very interested in most of the phenomena that currently have a 'two point oh tag' added to them, I truly hate the trend / fashion to make everything a ' 2.0 ' - so in many respects Laurence is absolutley right, the definition of ECM 2.0 is whatever we want it to be, and it can be delivered whenever the vendors and more importantly the customers, decide they are ready for it.

But... (and there is always a 'but' somewhere eh ?) its not quite that simple is it ? Nah, it never is......

So, I am attending CMF2007 in Aarhus next week to present a case study on the work we have undertaken so far on redeveloping our Intranet. Our CIO has always said that he see's the Intranet to be completely wound up with ECM, and I agree, its all simply different facets of 'information management', and as I always say in presentations on ECM, collaboration or whatever, its absolutely not about the 'tech' its about policy and procedures and most of all people, i.e having a policy on what works best presented on a static web page, a wiki, or as an MS Office 'document' in the ECMS.

So, notwithstanding the fact that the whole " Web 2.0 / Enterprise 2.0 " bubble could burst at any moment (follow the link to Steve Rubels take on this), lets examine what is out there, that we can add to our ECMS to make it ECM 2.0 - and I mean stuff available now, not in even the near future.

For a start John McKendrick over at FASTforward asks if 'web 2.0' is the business persons revenge for SOA ? Because SOA projects have become so large and complex, is the emergent goodness of Web 2.0 tools the only way business people can actually get their hands on useful collaborative tools ?

Well, to progress, let me give you three links to postings from Dion Hinchcliffe at ZDNet on Enterprise 2.0, in order:

• The State of Entperprise 2.0
  

• SaaS and Office 2.0 evolving towards Enterprise 2.0
  

• Significant workplace inroads for Entperise 2.0
  

The first posting gives a good review of Andrew McAfee's SLATES acronym. Lets see where ECM systems fit in 'SLATES' shall we ?

S = Search; one of the main arguements often given in the business case for ECM is the improvements in findability brought by having your content in a system which can manage metadata and provide metadata and full text indexing search - so 1 for ECM ?

L = Links; the deep linking between information using URI's - well a lot, of not most (or even all) ECMS now use persistent URI / URL to link to all content items - so thats 2 for ECM.

A = Authoring; ensuring all users have access to easy authoring tools - well not necessarily a good score for ECMS' on this one, even with built in MS Office connectors etc, or the ability to write small pieces of content using inline editing tools in the browser, when you add the burden of user created metadata etc then we might be slightly failing on this one - so ECM score now at 2.5 ?

T = Tags; or Metadata in other words. The more users get used to web 2.0 consumer systems, or even tagging their MP3 collections, the easier it is for them to understand the use of metadata in the enterprise. So, ease of use might not be overwhelmingly great, but ECMS have been doing 'tagging' for a long time, so ECM 3.5 for 4 ?

E = Extensions; extend knowledge by mining patterns and user activity. Well in my opinion any good ECMS should let you mine user activity data and report on whats going on in the system, even provide hooks for MI reporting or BI tools. So, 4.5 ?

S = Signals; make info consumption efficient by 'push', RSS feeds etc Well some ECMS are better at this than others, but even if they revert to the 'old fashioned' technology of email for their notifications and alerts, again a standard feature of ECMS' is the ability to subscribe to content and be informed if the content is changed updated etc, so final score could be 5.5 out of 6 ?

So what do you think ? Do current generation ECMS at meet the SLATES test of Web 2.0 goodness, within the context of enterprise information management ?

If you want, go to the second of Dion's postings, and do a your own checklist against the longer acronym of FLATNESSES - there is overlap with SLATES, but where the ECMS probably falls over is on F for 'Free form' and E for 'Emergent' and the S for 'Social' but then that all depends on how strident you are at applying Prof. McAfee's criteria. For example Documentum's eRooms is a collaborative system which part of EMC's ECMS (I could not resist that concatenation of our favourite 4 letters), and you can absolutely build social networking and social interactions in an eRoom, even if its not exactly Facebook.

The final of the 3 posting's in examining the take up of tools in the enterprise addresses the cultural element, and this should not be underestimated. The majority of the core 4,500 staff of my employer would probably be characterised as 'knowledge workers' under most definitions of the term, and yet I.T literacy is (IMHO) quite low. So getting alerts and notifications from the ECMS via email may add even more crud to your inbox, but are your staff ready for a mass migration to RSS feeds and feed readers ?

Back to a tenous link between this and my attendance at CMF2007 to talk about our intranet. We have been examining portal software technology, and have seen's demo's from big players like IBM and BEA. Over at the BEA en.terpri.se blog there is a posting on "why enterprise 2.0 matters, its about how people interact" and to me this brings us back round, full circle. It does not matter if your talking about an enterprise portal, an eRoom for a discrete group, the blogs used as 'news' sites by project teams, a wiki used by developers to document their software, in the end it should all be easy for the average end user to get to grips with, and should facilitate content centric collaboration and improved findability, and that call is taken up by Dan keldsen with this posting, where he asks the question 'who puts the C in ECM'.

So, to complete this long posting, and go round full circle, even if my cynism (or British pessimism) is sometimes misplaced, to truly get all of what is discussed above into a truly 'enteprise' wide content management, probably requires the SOA / standards based approach as espoused by Laurence. But even if the technology was perfect, your people might not be, so stop to consider how you get them to use this stuff ! (see comments on this at the Tower Software blog).

New search vendor and more on collaboration

Martin White of Intranet Focus was here yesterday, working on our Intranet redevelopment project with us. He mentioned a 'new' search engine vendor he had come across, DieselPoint who are based in Chicago.

I have added their link to the Search page of the resources site over at PageFlakes, where I have brought together a bunch of ECM, Entperise 2.0, Portals, Intranets and Enterprise Search links and RSS feeds.

Also very interesting, was Martin's take on the recent Gartner Portals Content and Collaboration summit in London. Martin's blog post is here, but to summarise the focus of the conference appears to have been on collaboration, and the realisation of enterprise CIO's that there are plenty of options other than Sharepoint or Notes - good news for all the vendors at the recent Office 2.0 conference !

Since the O2Con I have been trying to find time to play with the Sosius beta, and have not yet got round to playing with SmartSheets (but did send the link to Martin and our Intranet manager Nicky). To be honest I have been busy trying turn my british CV into a Canadian style Resume - but my wife and I use BaseCamp, and Google Docs & Sheets for planning immigration activity.

But once again there in lies the rub - just because Google have jumped into bed with CapGemini, and are attempting to solve the online / offline issues with 'gears' it does not mean 'web 2.0' consumer oriented tools are ready for 'enterprise 2.0' prime time. However whilst I can stick to my earlier assertion that the start-ups should concentrate on the SME niche, perhaps Martin's notes from the Gartner event suggest that CIO's are awakening to wider (outside or through the firewall) possibilities.

Enterprise collaboration session

Chaired by Dan Farber, with the august panel consisting of:

Scott Dietzen, President and CTO, Zimbra
Etay Gafni, Architect, SAP
Sam Lawrence, Chief Marketing Officer, Jive Software
Oliver Marks, Senior Project Manager, Sony Computer Entertainment America
Paul Pedrazzi, Oracle AppsLab Director, Oracle
Jay Simons, Senior Director of Product Marketing, BEA Systems

Dan started by asking what added the 2.0 to collaboration in the opinions of the panel members. Scott suggested the contingent mix of push / pull technologies and the use of mashups to improve the user experience. Paul suggested the main difference is putting the focus on the person (rather than the process) and breaking down silo's. Jay suggested useability is the focus, but also noted that the '2.0' technologies are supplementing not supplanting all that went before within the enterprise.

Oliver from Sony made some very interesting points, getting straight to the crux of the matter ! He started by saying that he (like me) dislikes the '2.0' moniker, that in fact '2.0' is the 'norm' at Sony. He went onto to say that they are big on the 'portal' approach, bringing all the applications and information someone needs to do their job together in a portal and so from his point of view any new technologies should be modular, so they can be integrated easily into the portal.

Oliver went on to cover another point, one that I heard discussed many times across the two days and that is one of the main issues for me when it comes to 'enterprise 2.0': to take these app's from consumer space to enterprise space, they must be offered for hosting on the organisations own infrastructure, within the firewall. Indeed, Sony go as far as demanding access to the source code of any app they use ! If they can't get the source code, they go else where (nice to be able to be in that position). I will return to Olivers points in a later summary posting.

Our MC gave his next question to the panel; how do you deal with idea of spreading the 'people centric message' - how do you deal with "yeah, thats cool, really great, now I am going back to my work...."

The responses centered around the use of social networks in the enterprise being all about filtering the signal from the noise, and being about focusing connections within the team, the department the division and maybe outside the enterprise. A comment was made about the fact that an email with a link from a trusted colleague, is probably going to be considered more important than the days top links on digg.

Jay suggested Facebook as an example, is popular because it helps filter the noise - I am not sure I agree, but the OU has not experimented with a private Facebook group yet, but at the moment I more likely to get a zombie or vampire bite than a useful message via Facebook !

Anyway, to finish off a very interesting session, Dan asked one further questions "whats the future vision, where do you see things going" ?

The summary of the responses to this are: current trends might be making things easier, but there is no great paradigm shift, however the 'wisdom of crowds' could provoke such a shift, alongside greater prioritisation and automation of tasks leading to quick and efficient creation of ad hoc workflows.