Sunday, September 22, 2013

Looking beyond the Social Hype of Enterprise Collaboration Tools

Starting a discussion about enterprise collaboration tools the “visionary” individual in the group says: “I want Facebook for me and my colleagues”. And as Ed Lopategui and Oleg Shilovitsky pointed out in their blogs last weekend - Facebook and social platforms are probably not exactly what she should be looking for. So instead of getting fooled by the allure of marketing promises of social enterprise tools what should she be looking for? 
What Facebook and actually most other social applications are providing is not only a real-time chat but something that is asynchronous and persistent and doesn’t require that someone is actually receiving the message at the point in time when it is sent. Due to the global environment in which companies are working in today this is a “must have” as time zones would be a too much of an obstacle otherwise.
Many collaboration tools are coming from vendors already offering CAD, ERP, CRM, PLM, etc but these are primarily focused on the users and practices of that specific system. It’s basically not user centric! If you would take the users standpoint in such a solution you would easily see that you would allow for cool collaboration but only within the island of that application … and for the end user that is not enough - how many are there living in a one-app or even a one-suite world? So we need something that has crossed the application barriers and can work stand alone or integrated depending on need.
Moving towards a “neutral” collaboration platform would also be a step forward to enable a nowadays quite popularly addressed part of enterprise collaboration – the one towards the suppliers. Not only would we have the “normally” implemented structured exchange of information in place, it would also enable us to support the more unstructured and ad-hoc part of it. Moving away from mail and creating a more transparent way of communicating.
This takes me to the next point – Transparency. When I say transparency I don’t necessarily mean that everything is accessible to anybody. But you can share and you can collaborate across disciplines and multiple users without having to cc each other like you do with a mail! This is a key feature and required if we want to break out from the silos that emails are creating.
So what about mail then? Well, I wouldn’t be so bold to say that mail will disappear the next coming years, but we could definitely fight to reduce the volume of messages going back and forth. With good hooks and APIs to import and generate emails and to plugin and expose features in other tools and portals I bet we could give it a good fight too ;)
Another thing with mails is that it allows the user to structure her things in her way. Creating folders and tasks are features which allow the user to create her world and semantics. Allowing her to find and organize the information in her way.
The thing that neither Facebook nor email has is context – the user is the context in these applications. To bring the features of email and Facebook into enterprise collaboration we need to hook it into an item context. And that is exactly what the vendors of the CAD, ERP, CRM, PLM tools offers – the right data context! But only from their application point of view! Users are working within processes supported by multiple applications. In reality “the context” is something moving across multiple applications and across functional domains and we need to treat the communication the same way.
Tying together most of the features implied above is the accessibility and searchability – for the communication, collaboration, transparency, email, and context to be worth anything you really need to be able to find stuff.
So now I have stated some features I consider important when thinking about collaboration tools. Although being good, they bring some softer challenges to the table, which might be easier to mitigate in current collaboration solutions.
One challenge is to do the right thing in the right place and in the right forum ... and still making it understandable to the user.
  • Data in the “right” place - will we create a mess and store important information in a too unstructured way?
  • Decisions in the “right” place - will decision be made invisible and will we lose the formality required of some decisions? Statuses, do we need them anymore ;)
Then we have an obvious challenge - getting people to move from a silo mail-world to a world which is no longer under “my” control. Transparency is scary. There is no way around that.
So to summarize; Facebook is probably not the way forward for enterprise collaboration tools and there are some challenges to address on both technical and a human level with today’s collaborative tools. One thing is for sure - just because we might re-label "the solution" from time to time the need will still be there. The problem is when the label brings assumptions to the table which are not suited for an enterprise collaboration tool. I'm sure that we will get past the current misconceptions and as collaboration and digital technologies are advancing it will allow us to solve our challenges though new influences and tools. 

Robert Wallerblad