Spanning the Divide

By Michael Sampson
in

I attended an eResearch workshop in New Zealand this week. The focus was on how researchers are using advanced research networks—basically really fat pipes, access to high performance computing resources, processor- and memory-intensive compute jobs, and more—to do better science. Collaboration was a big theme during the workshop, with “collaboration” being thrown about left, right and center. There were a couple of excellent presentations on how the new capabilities were enabling the re-thinking of work.

But…the biggest roadblock to getting researchers to embrace “new science” is how to get them to understand what’s possible. In other words, who bridges the divide between the people doing science, and the people offering new technology and resources to enable science to be done in new and different ways? For example, one researcher asked “Does this mean I can email a 1TB file to a colleague now?” Apart from blowing up the email server, that’s not the idea—instead of sharing snapshot-in-time data, new science involves near real-time access to the same data by multiple people in multiple geographical locations. There were some ideas discussed about how to span this divide, from new training courses to individual mentoring.

At the conclusion of the workshop, I spoke to the moderator and observed that this is the greatest challenge in the collaboration tools world more generally too. As an IT manager with a SharePoint for collaboration implementation at his firm, he nodded in agreement. He commented that standard IT operations shops are not geared up for doing much beyond keeping the infrastructure running. They aren’t resourced to span the divide. They don’t have the people skills to span the divide. They don’t have the inner motivation to span the divide. And so he’s building a new and separate team to work with the business people in his firm to provide direction, advice, and on-the-ground assistance about how SharePoint can help them in their work.

As I walked away from the workshop, I reflected on what he’d just said, and realized afresh that that was basically the advice in SharePoint Roadmap for Collaboration around governance. You’ll find this in Chapter 4, but basically you need three groups to make SharePoint work: a strategy and steering group to set strategy and direction, a SharePoint technology group to do the IT stuff, and a business impact group to work as internal consultants to business groups to help them understand the possibilities. This is a similar structure to what Intranet strategists recommend for making Intranets work too, and from the eResearch workshop, it’s a rising idea there too.

So this makes me wonder: Thinking specifically about how to help people understand the possibilities of new technology, how do you deal with introducing new technology—collaboration or otherwise—into your firms, when people have to change the way they work?

Published September 22, 2009