[Web Informant] 16 February 2009: Can collaboration save our economy?

[David Strom]

Web Informant 16 February 2009: Can collaboration save our economy?

The economic news is depressing, and yet I want to see opportunity
where others see looming disaster. And I think one way we can try to
make things better is become more productive and do a better job
collaborating with each other. Think of it as a no-cost stimulus
package that even the Republicans can love.

Remember when the PC was first introduced, everyone thought it was
such a great personal productivity tool? Sadly, the more powerful that
PCs have become, the harder it is to use them to collaborate. This is
because we get used to using them as our personal machines, and most
of us don't like sharing our computers, let alone our work products
from them.

The primary collaboration tool today is still what it was ten years
ago: I send you an email attachment with a Word or Excel file. You
make changes and then email the file back for me to look at. This is
really serial collaboration, because we alternate working on the same
file. While this model is okay for two people, when you have a whole
group that is trying to add their thoughts it gets very messy, to say
the least. Also, one person can hold up the entire process and then
the rest of the group has to wait until that person has finished their
revisions. And if we don't agree, we pretty much have to start the
process from scratch. A friend of mine is ghost writing a book for two
of his bosses. I can't imagine what his editing cycle is going to be
like under this model.

It is time to realize that serial email-style collaboration is so last
year. Consider these trends:

First, the Internet is now ubiquitous and most of us are comfortable
using it to connect to our partners, supplies, customers, and
colleagues. It has also made email more powerful, and most of us have
become addicted to checking our email several times a day and even
during off hours too. Some of us have to check email so frequently
that we start to get a bit jittery when we are offline for a few
hours, let alone when we want to take a week off on some deserted
beach where there isn't any connectivity.

Contrast this with Lotus Notes, which has been around for about 20
years and supposed to be the be-all and end-all collaborative tool, or
Microsoft's SharePoint, which is more recent. Both Notes and
Sharepoint require everyone to run it, and develop to its own
programming interfaces. That seems so quaint and outmoded now. And
both are very quirky to install and deploy, which makes them less
desirable too.

Second, email is a great notification system and a great way to
organize your to-do list. You don't have to use it as the
transportation system for sending documents around, though. As an
example, you can set up a blog to automatically notify via email when
someone posts a comment to a particular page, so people can
participate in a discussion thread but don't have to continually
return to that page to find out what has been posted.

Third, free or low-cost Internet applications have come of age, such
as Google Docs, Google Calendar, Trackvia, Tripit, Timedriver,
Hourtown and Setmeeting. All of these don't require any software to
download, don't have a lot of upfront training or even any dough to
use, which means that people can experiment with them and see if they
will be suitable for their needs. All of these products can offload
some of the tasks that we are used to doing on email and make us more
productive in scheduling meetings, sharing work product, and arranging
our time. Look for a story from me in the New York Times next month on
this topic.

Fourth, instant messaging has become more useful for connecting remote
work teams together and can be used as another notification system
that is more immediate and more potent in terms of bringing people
together. Some firms are beginning to use the built-in IM features of
Facebook and Twitter for this purpose too. Again, this takes some load
away from looking at your inbox for starting a particular task or
trying to get a colleague's attention.

Finally, there are other tools for two-person collaboration that will
work better in real time, such as LogMeIn or GoToMyPC, that allow two
people to actually see each other's computer screen while they are
talking on the phone. My podcasting partner Paul Gillin likes
Yuuguu.com, which allows teams of 25 to share the same desktop, no
matter if they are on Linux, Mac or Windows.

We still have a long way to go when it comes to collaborating
effectively, and I since we are talking about sharing do share your
own stories with my audience and post to this entry on
strominator.com. I will have more to say on this topic for a keynote
speech that I am giving in Philadelphia in April for the American
Hardware Manufacturer's Association. If you want me to come talk to
your organization, you can send me email, or better yet, just call me
on the phone.