Collaboration Technology

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>> In the nineties what we found was that personal productivity really created and drove business growth. Today, it's interpersonal productivity or collaboration that is driving business growth.

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>> Collaboration. The word conjures up images of teams working in harmony, seamlessly piecing together different parts of a project to be delivered on time and on budget.

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>> There's no match.

>> But in reality, collaboration often works better in theory than in practice.

>> Collaborative efforts can be highly beneficial to companies today; but usually if there's a problem, people often blame the technology and this is really incorrect.

>> Open.

>> You really have to be much more holistic and look at people and processes as well as the technology.

>> Hey good job on the form. I just made a few changes here.

>> Okay no problem. All right.

>> Hey Tim, Tim, Tim, can you read this?

>> No.

>> And make sure that when you use these technologies you tie them in to a critical business process.

>> Now what do I do?

>> David Coleman is the Founder and Managing Director of Collaborative Strategies. He's been involved with online communities, collaborative technologies and knowledge management since 1989.

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>> David: My Company tracks a thousand different collaboration tools; there's online Web 2.0 collaboration tools; Real Time Collaboration tools; Web conferencing tools; virtual team space tools; distributive project management tools. What's really important to consider is that the people buying collaborative solutions today are no longer just IT people like they were in the 90's, but more and more they're line of business people and consumers. There's also more collaborative applications available online or hosted today and these applications are often free and supported by advertising, and they offer you a try before you buy option; so you can try it with your team for 30 or 60 days before you even make any kind of investment into the technology.

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>> David: So it used to be that you'd send documents around to everyone and they gave their input or made changes or approval only to find out that someone else got a different version or a mistake was made or something was added that you didn't see.

>> Okay. I have to backtrack. I'll find out; sorry.

>> David: And it really didn't work very well. You had to backtrack, fix, redo, it wasn't very productive. These days sending documents around is not a best practice. It's better to create a virtual team space or use a tool that like Google does with Google dots and spreadsheets, and in Google if you send an e-mail with an attachment it's very much frowned upon. They really want you to send a link to the document online where you could collaborate with someone and make the changes; and then there is just one version of the document. All the documents online are in a collaboration suite and any changes that happen can be tracked. You can have check in, check out of documents and version tracking. A good example of this is a matched up backbone called Open Sam which has about 15 different tools; things like online presentation tools or tools like Excel or spreadsheets or word documents in addition to document management tools, and they allow you to match them up into something called The Shared Office. Another idea that's very popular is to do something like a virtual deal room; and in a virtual deal room you may have an M & A team that needs high levels of security, has a variety of different types of documents like financial or legal documents, and they can put them in this room or a virtual team space and track people and see which documents they've looked at or which ones they haven't looked at.

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>> David: Today, web conferencing has become very popular. It's really low priced these days; you can even get some for free. It's a lot easier to use and there's tons of vendors out there. It's practically become a commodity much like the telephone. However, web conferencing tools still are not as easier or as transparent that they could be. We get very little information about people we're meeting with.

>> Look I'm supposed to be at a web conference right now but who's looking.

>> David: We don't know if they're not paying attention, if they're off reading e-mail which is often the case in a web conference or have actually removed themselves from the conference and we're just getting not enough information.

>> What do you mean call me back? I'm not even busy.

>> David: Today we're starting to see some new technologies come to the floor. We call these augmented environments or augmented meeting environments. An example of that is J. Farrett assumed spelling which is a job-based browser which offers appropriate metadata as well as raw data to give you a unified view of all the people in the meeting. You can see thumbnails of everyone who's in the meeting so you can make sure they're paying attention, you can see color coded transcripts to show who is dominant in a meeting, who is talking the most, who's interrupting the most; how long each person takes to talk and what their reaction is. These environments are a perfect place to meet and discuss critical and emotional issues. For example, if you're doing sensitive negotiation that really you can't do face to face, this is a perfect environment to use that kind of tool.

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>> David: Today, virtual worlds and 3D collaborative environments are very hot. These 3D environments are where you take life in the form of an avatar or representation of yourself in the virtual world. And you can do and say as you life within the confines of that world. Up to now these have mostly been consumer or gaming environments such as Second Life or World War craft. But there are some new environments such as Quaak or Sun's Wonderland that really target the business community. Quaak's forms are created specifically for collaboration; whether you're working internally with other team members and groups or need to collaborate with members of your supply chain, customers, or partners, what you can do is take files and folders from your desktop and they can be dragged and drop into a screen in the Quaak environment. They can be worked on simultaneously and saved. You can also create meeting rooms, offices, labs, doctors' offices or any other type of room or indoor space from existing room templates and these virtual worlds can be highly useful when dealing with teams in remote offices. And of course there's the fun factor--it's just a lot more fun. But the greater purpose is the idea of coming together around a specific project and be able to work on it in a virtual world and in real time.

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>> David: People really have to have a good user experience. It has to be integrated and connected to as many data and content sources within the enterprise as possible.

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>> For more information go to bnet.com, the go-to place for managers.

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