FEATURE EDITORIAL

The Changing Locus of Collaboration

Many of the new tools that are being released to the market for "collaboration" are more broadly focused than supporting the activities of teams working on explicit shared outcomes. While supporting teams will remain a critical locus of collaboration technology, we are seeing the emergence of a second locus. In order to understand what is happening, we need to think about collaboration within the context of the five phases of the content lifecycle—creation, publication, leverage (business use), archival and deletion. Team collaboration happens within the creation phase, whereas many of the new tools target the second and third phases.

Collaborating during the creation phase of the content lifecycle means working together to create great content. It is an explicit activity. You know that you are working together with others because you can either see them directly (they are in the same office), or because they will starting bugging you if you don't complete what you promised or participate in something you said you would.

Collaborating in the latter parts of the content lifecycle, on the other hand, is largely implicit. It means that the normal, everyday actions of people in relation to published content is taken into consideration to the benefit of others in the future when they come to browse and access published content. Think about it in terms of searching for a specific keyword within a document management system. Today when the search is undertaken, the user receives a list of documents that include the term that has been ranked using certain algorithms related to the content itself. Thus, machine algorithms meet the search needs of end-users.

As an alternative, a user does the same search and this time the results come back with additional contextual information based upon the use of social algorithms. The user can see how many people have already read each of the documents that have been listed. Also available is an accumulated rating score for each of the documents, derived from what earlier readers thought about each one. The user sees how the document has been classified by other people, and can quickly click to see a collection of other documents that share the same classification.

The document with the highest density of words that matches the original query under the machine algorithm may actually be the worst document for answering the question being asked. Because the actions of colleagues have been captured and synthesized into something meaningful—the social algorithm—the user can see which documents get the highest social rating. This is a form of collaboration, although it is a different form from team collaboration. Users "collaborate" by taking the actions, decisions and reactions of other people to help guide what they do. "Which of the documents will I read, and which ones will I not?" The user takes the best information presented via the machine algorithm and mixes it with the additional context provided by the social algorithm to make a choice.

Looking out across the newer "Enterprise 2.0" tools on the market, we note that these are introducing new capabilities to compute this social algorithm. Remember, the underlying user actions are happening today, just as they used to be. The difference is now they are being tracked and utilized, with some new constructs put in front of users to help them shape the social algorithm:

Content Rating…as a reader of this content, what do I think of this, and how good do I judge it to be?

Tags and Tag Normalization…how do I think about and classify this material, and therefore how does it link to other items of content in the wider organization?

Semantic Matching…as a reader who has a set of things that interest me, based on the analysis of other people with similar interest, what other related areas should I be interested in?

Expertise Surfacing…as a reader, who do I think is good at what they do in a certain area of the business—whom do I trust and look to for words of wisdom—and as a result, should other people look to them too? Who are the real experts based upon our communal reactions to their work contributions?

All of this post-publishing collaboration is based on implicit actions and cues. Users do not know the other people who will specifically benefit from their rating activities. Further, users are highly likely to be blind to the impact that their mere reading activity has on implicit content algorithms, but in sum it should all come together to make for a more informed community of people.

Michael Sampson

NEWS HIGHLIGHTS

Failure Rate

What percentage of collaboration software implementations fail? CIO Magazine pins the number at 80 percent, but Todd Stephens argues that it is closer to 40 percent fail, but 95 percent fail to succeed. "Why would we have such a high degree of failure? Perhaps the answer is we have been so successful and we continue to apply our old rules and definitions of success. The reason these applications don't succeed is that the majority of implementations don't focus on succeeding but rather they focus on not failing. I like to use the terms Components of Failure vs. Components of Success."

Investing in U.C.

IBM is betting big on unified communications, with a pledge of US$1 billion in upcoming investments. InfoWorld reports, "IBM is ramping up its investment in products like Lotus Sametime to provide unified communications to the largest business customers, which the company defines as having 1,000 or more employees. This is also the sweet spot for IBM's Lotus Notes collaboration software, the latest version of which includes the Sametime unified communications client." ChannelWeb adds, "Over the next year, IBM software and services will be offered to enable anytime, anywhere productivity and will expand IBM's reach across devices, from desktops and laptops to BlackBerrys, iPhones and other devices. IBM is also working to reach across all major platforms including Windows, Mac and Linux to enable office capabilities to workforces regardless of device or location."

Google Gears

Google recently announced Windows Mobile 5 and 6 editions of Google Gears, for synchronization and offline access to Web data on mobile devices, such as the personal finance service Buxfer and online applications provider Zoho Re Zoho: "Currently we support Windows Mobile 6.0. Documents in Zoho Writer can be viewed using Internet Explorer on your Windows Mobile device. The current version supports viewing your documents; document editing will be offered later."

We welcome your ideas and your news for Collaboration Newswire's News & Trends in Collaboration. Let us know what you think by sending your comments to editorial@messagingnews.com. Written or compiled by Michael Sampson. All trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

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