I was at a conference in Orlando on Knowledge Management and Collaboration for just the day.  My goals in coming here for such a short time (and flying 6000 miles in one day) are to find great collaboration case studies and to get a handle on where KM stops and collaboration starts, or vice versa.  The definition of collaboration here seems to be largely threaded discussions.

 I just sat through a very interesting presentation from a woman from the World Bank whose title is Senior Knowledge and Learning Specialist.

In 1997, the then president of the World Bank announced a major initiative to turn the organization into a “knowledge bank,” whose major purpose other than lending was to share knowledge regarding development and reconstruction with the world at large.  They received three years of significantly increased funding and established knowledge managers in each division and “thematic groups” or communities of practice that promoted tacit learning among their members.  At the end of the three years, the funding ran out and while the group had had successes in many areas, they failed overall to embed the practice of knowledge sharing into the core processes of the organization, due in some part to the departure of the president who had championed the initiative.  Nevertheless, some communities of practice continued to flourish despite the complete dismantling of the program, and some have even been born since the program ended.

The speaker’s best anecdote served not only as an illustration of the success of CoPs, but also a metaphor for successful technologies that facilitate them.  A manager in charge of rebuilding roads in Afghanistan was faced with the choice between concrete pavers and tarmac.  Conventional wisdom said that only tarmac would meet the requirements, but the manager had seen roads of concrete pavers do well over time and wanted to try them.  The manager tapped a Community of Practice looking for advice and got enough evidence to support doing half the road in tarmac, half in concrete pavers.  Three years later, the concrete paver half is a little worse for the wear, but dramatically better off than the tarmac, which is plagued with potholes.  It turns out that the local community could build and maintain the concrete pavers with current resources and equipment, and when they needed to access systems under the road, they simply lifted the paver up, dug out, and put it back when the problem was fixed.  The tarmac required equipment and resources from multinational contractors, and therefore additional World Bank loans, to fix.  It sometimes makes more sense to build a slightly bumpier road than one we can’t fix on our own, and there is there a lesson there for collaborative technologies? No pun intended, but this quite literally Small Pieces Loosely Joined. 

I just spent an hour or so jamming.  Specifically, I was participating in Habitat Jam.  For the uninitiated, Habitat Jam is a Massively Parallel Conference, or MPC, in the tradition of IBM’s WorldJam.  WorldJam, which took place in May 2001, was a 72-hour event to which all 320,000 IBM employees were invited to participate in discussions of cross-company issues.  Over 55,000 IBMers participated.  I was one of a handful of outside observers watching what happens when you put 55,000 people into a virtual room (see our report on WorldJam).

Habitat Jam is a 72-hour event discussed six topics of global importance, ranging from "Sustainable Access to Water", to "Finance and Governance", to "Humanity: The Future of Our Cities".  When I logged in, individuals from over 90 countries were actively participating.  7,000 people had already participated in the New Delhi Jam-related event.

The project is a gesture on the part of the Government of Canada, UN-HABITAT, and IBM to make the process of collective thinking inclusive.  It brings together experts, world leaders, and thousands of individuals who care about the future of our cities. 

It’s still going on - you can join right now at http://www.habitatjam.com.

Are we genetically predisposed to collaborate?  There may be a biological basis as to why some individuals collaborate and multitask far more effectively than others.

In 2003, Harvard researcher Shelley H. Carson and two colleagues published research in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology focusing on latent inhibition and conducted studies that would address the question whether creative individuals benefit from low latent inhibition.

Latent inhibition is "the capacity to screen from conscious awareness stimuli previously experienced as irrelevant"  (Carson, Peterson, and Higgins, 2003, p. 499).  In other words, latent inhibition helps people filter out random inputs.  Low latent inhibition, i.e. a state where an individual has a reduced capacity to filter out extraneous stimuli, has previously been associated in the literature with psychotic states or with psychotic proneness.

But some highly intelligent individuals are more porous, and simply do not filter out all such irrelevant stimuli.  In fact, they may accept these extra inputs and the inputs become a part of the creative process.

This means that creative people remain more aware of and alert to extra information that comes streaming in from the surrounding environment.  A "normal" person would see an object, classify it, and then forget about it, even though the object may be far more complex than he believes it to be.  Someone who is less mentally keen needs to filter out extraneous stimuli in order to avoid suffering from overload and a resulting psychosis.

Carson, in the May-June 2004 issue of Harvard Magazine, explains that "Intelligence allows you to manipulate the additional stimuli in novel ways without being overwhelmed by them." 

Reading this article got me thinking: how might low latent inhibition impact knowledge workers?

A highly intelligent knowledge worker with a good memory might actually benefit from low latent inhibition, as it would amplify that person’s capacity to think about many things and issues at one time.  This predisposes such a person to being open to new information and concepts — hence, that person could multitask more effectively and discriminate between everything that’s coming his way.

If you have ever noticed that some people can easily manage multiple inputs, a conference call, documents, a half dozen instant messaging sessions — all at the same time — while most others cannot, you may have been observing someone with low latent inhibition.

We’ll be looking at this issue in more depth in the coming months; in the meantime, please share your thoughts and experiences with me by writing to me at collabloop@basex.com.

My previous post included an overview of a new communication/collaboration framework focused on channels for communication, workspaces for collaboration, and contextual communication/collaboration.  Today’s post summarizes some of the key reasons why the intuitive simplicity of the channels/workspaces/context framework has yet to become mainstream reality (but will soon, as I’ll explain in my next few posts).

One key cause stems from the fact that historically popular communication/collaboration products have been costly, complex, and closed (generally proprietary, e.g., often predating related industry standards such as SIP).  Many of the leading products have also been targeted at enterprise deployments, making them inappropriate (in terms of administrative complexity and/or economics) for small- to medium-sized businesses or departmental deployments.

A second cause of current communication/collaboration complexity and chaos is the result of often artificial, arbitrary, and counterproductive boundaries among tools focused on communication, collaboration, and content management.  Many enterprises have distinct tools (and corresponding support teams) for enterprise messaging, real-time communication, collaboration, content management, web content management, and document management, for example, along with significant challenges in integrating resources managed by the disparate tools.

The explosive growth in channels and workspaces, in terms of both type and volume, is another problem source.  Most information workers spend inordinate amounts of time processing email channels, for example, and email’s expansion has coincided with a variety of challenges (spam, viruses, and other security and privacy problems) that have made it far less effective as a communication channel. 

There has also been growth in what might be considered “good-enough,” often Internet-based alternatives such as blogs and wikis.  Blogs are powerful communication channels, while wikis are compelling and lightweight, content-focused collaborative workspaces.  Both tool types emerged in part to address historical limitations in earlier alternatives, being generally simpler and less expensive, for example.  For many people, however, blogs and wikis aren’t an entirely welcome advance, as they add to the already overwhelming number of channels and workspaces that must be routinely tracked.

Significant product strategy changes among the leading incumbent communication/collaboration vendors have also contributed to the complexity and chaos.  IBM and Microsoft have both made major changes to their respective product lines during the last few years, and while the changes are ultimately beneficial (resulting in simpler, more powerful, and often more cost-effective products), they have also been disruptive. 

IBM Lotus Notes/Domino had something of an existential crisis several years ago, for example, with IBM strongly suggesting Notes/Domino was to be retired in favor of its new Workplace product family, although IBM has since clarified the role of Notes/Domino in its evolving Workplace product line.  Microsoft also made several disruptive changes, such as quietly abandoning the failed instant messaging, web conferencing, and workflow-oriented features it introduced with Exchange Server 2000, and introducing new products such as Live Meeting and Live Communication Server to fill the Exchange collaboration void.

Ineffective etiquette and incentive systems are also longstanding causes of communication/collaboration chaos and complexity.  If individuals work within organizations that aren’t conducive to effective communication/collaboration, they’re likely to revert to lowest-common-denominator alternatives such as email messages with file attachments, phone, instant messaging, and fax – even when doing so exposes companies to security and regulatory compliance risks.

Fortunately, the new communication/collaboration framework, driven by several related market trends, is effectively addressing many of the historical challenges.  I’ll highlight some of the most important trends in my next few posts.

I’ve been planning to write about calendaring for several months now, but time, ahem, keeps getting away from me.  I’m pleased to see that this area is now the focus of some innovative start ups and getting some attention from the likes of Esther Dyson.  She interviews Yori Nelken, who is working on launching TimeBridge, early next year.  But there are existing offerings I have yet to check out, including Trumba, which appears to play in the social software space.  Stay tuned in the coming weeks as I explore the possibilities and offerings, and attempt to answer the question: why must I spend half my life finding a time to meet? 

If scheduling meetings doesn’t frustrate you to the point of laughter or near rage, you’re either a zen master or you don’t get out enough. As Clay Shirky said at CTC 2005, enterprise collaboration systems are great for companies that don’t have customers, contractors, or suppliers.  At MediaLive, we run Lotus Notes, and wherever I’ve worked under a Notes regime (here and at previous companies) the calendar has been the only feature implemented to distinguish Notes from a bloated email program.  It’s not that it’s not valuable; when I used to manage a team of up to 25 people, I insisted everyone use the Notes Calendar religiously so that I could avoid spending hours a week moving meetings to accommodate team members who “didn’t get the memo.” But since it doesn’t work outside our group, it’s currently ameliorating only about 25% of my scheduling hell.  My own recent attempt to schedule a time to meet with John Battelle, chair of Web 2.0, Gina Blaber, conference director at O’Reilly Media, and Marco Pardi, our VP of sales, resulted in an email thread 25 messages long during which, at one point, we believed ourselves to have found a common time, only to discover that in the time it took to confirm everyone else for that slot, it had then been otherwise spoken for on John’s calendar. Back to the drawing board.

And this was for a meeting of only four (admittedly quite busy) people. Throw in a few more and it gets exponentially worse. We’ve all had these experiences, and it’s my theory that we all accept this as a problem technology cannot and will not solve for us, for a couple of reasons.  One, interoperability.  Duh.  Two, loss of control.  We assume that any system that came close to solving this problem would remove the cushion between “us” and “everyone else,” allowing those we don’t want to meet with to know that we do, in fact, have the time to see them, and simply choose not to, or simply provide a degree of transparency into our lives that we are uncomfortable with (“Sorry, David can’t make that time, he’s got an appointment with his sex therapist then.”) 

The third reason we seem to accept this state of affairs is that we assume the problem is too complex to address in any meaningful way.  As with so many other collaborative technologies, if the solution only partly works, eventually users will revert to the old fashioned way, and the value drops to zero.  Esther Dyson talks a bit about the levels of complexity inherent in this challenge, including the observation that

Most scheduling involves other people and external constraints - the schedules of people more important, external events such as conference time tables, financial quarters and customers’ activities, availability of resources. Some of these constraints are visible; some aren’t. More important, there’s an invisible hierarchy to the constraints, and it is all very, very dynamic.

As Yori Nelken says, “Scheduling meetings is a negotiation, not an invitation.”  This awareness of the social context of the task is, I believe, the ray of hope that this generation of solutions will provide real benefit. 

All the king’s horses
And all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again*

*But in the end, the telecommunications industry did one better.

For decades, companies and households had but one supplier to turn to for all of their telephony needs: Ma Bell.  More formally known as AT&T and represented through local Bell Operating Companies such as New York Telephone and Pacific Bell, Ma Bell was reminiscent of a kind but stern parent, happy to provide a dial tone but not letting others compete for their children’s attention.

Yesterday the new AT&T opened its doors for business, with a resplendent new logo (I’ll reserve my comments on the redesign).  The company is the largest supplier of telecommunications services to business in the U.S., which makes it a key provider in support of collaboration tools.  AT&T also holds a 60 percent ownership interest in Cingular Wireless.  This is where things get confusing.

Almost a dozen years ago, AT&T bought McCaw Cellular, which the company immediately renamed AT&T Wireless.  In 2000, AT&T Wireless became a separate division, in anticipation of spinning it off, which AT&T did in 2001.  After a few years of going their own way, the two companies formed a partnership to bundle AT&T Wireless service with AT&T wireless offerings.  In 2004, Cingular bought AT&T Wireless.  As part of the deal, AT&T got the AT&T brand back for wireless offerings and the former AT&T Wireless customers became Cingular customers.  Cingular and AT&T had both moved from TDMA to GSM for their networks so it was a nice fit.

Last year, AT&T, recognizing it needed such an offering, signed a deal with Sprint to offer Sprint wireless service (which uses CDMA, not GSM).  Before anything came out of this relationship, SBC, which owns 60% of Cingular, bought AT&T and the merged company assumed the AT&T brand.  It probably won’t be long until Cingular customers start seeing the AT&T brand.

Of course, SBC’s purchase of AT&T is part of what was referred to as the Humpty Dumpty theory at the time of the break-up of the Bell System, when observers (including myself) noted that it was not inconceivable that one of the Baby Bells could reverse divestiture in whole or in part with acquisitions.

So, in case you missed it:

• Nynex was purchased by Bell Atlantic in 1997 
• Pacific Bell was purchased by SBC (née Southwestern Bell) in 1998
• Ameritech was purchased by SBC in 1999
• US West merged with Qwest, a long distance and fiber optics company, in 2000
• Bell Atlantic purchased GTE, which was a non-AT&T regional operating company, in 2000, and changed its name to Verizon

In 2002, when the WorldCom bankruptcy filing eclipsed even that of Enron, Bellheads savored the fairly brief moment when it appeared that AT&T had outlasted MCI (then part of WorldCom).  

Last year, WorldCom emerged from bankruptcy protection as MCI, after nearly collapsing from an $11 billion accounting fraud.  MCI was a shadow of its former self, but it did have a worldwide voice and data network that was highly desirable.  Although the company’s capacity is about half that of AT&T, only Sprint, a distant third, remains as an independent supplier of voice and data communications services.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

Communication and collaboration concepts have been inconsistently applied during the last couple decades, sometimes resulting in considerable customer confusion and consternation. Some of the terms vendors have used to describe their products include groupware, teamware, and workflow, but the similarities and differences among the categories haven’t been clearly defined, and some vendors have even been inconsistent in their use of fundamental concepts such as communication and collaboration (some consider communication to be a subset of collaboration, for instance).

Fortunately, consensus is emerging on a new, consistent, simpler, and standards-based framework for communication and collaboration.  The new framework is composed of channels for communication and workspaces for collaboration.  It also includes tools and services designed to maximize the extent to which people can work in their preferred contexts, enabling them to focus on their real-world activities rather than switching among a collection of distinct tools for different facets of communication and collaboration.

At the risk of seeming a bit pedantic, it’s useful to briefly elaborate on the three key concepts:

1. Communication is the exchange of information (through assorted channels)

2. Collaboration is joint purposeful activity within a workspace, typically focused on a document, project, or process

3. Context refers to the circumstances wherein something takes place

Communication and collaboration may be asynchronous or synchronous.  Examples of commonly used asynchronous communication channels include email, XML syndication-based (e.g., RSS or Atom) resources such as blogs and newsfeeds, faxes, and systems based on NNTP (the Network News Transfer Protocol).  Synchronous communication channels include instant messaging, real-time audio and video, and telephony (with the latter increasingly virtualized, via services such as Skype). 

There’s a similar distinction for collaboration, with asynchronous workspaces incorporating tools for joint activities such as document sharing, discussion forums, and project calendars.  Synchronous workspaces are also increasingly popular, e.g., for multi-participant web conferencing and other types of shared tools for group brainstorming (using shared whiteboards and other tools) and other collaborative endeavors.

Workspaces and channels are complementary.  Communication is often conducive to collaboration, for example, with activity in communication channels (such as a competitive update or a customer request for proposal) leading people to gather in a workspace in order to collaborate on appropriate actions.  Similarly, collaboration usually results in communication, such as a workgroup publishing updates for others to receive via their preferred channels.

Workspaces and channels are not, however, interchangeable.  Anyone who has attempted to coordinate a complex collaborative task via email understands that collaboration via communication channels is usually ineffective.  Problems include information dissipation (people filing information in different email folders, for example, or who never see the information in the first place, due to overzealous spam filters), the lack of a consistent record of activities and artifacts (making it very difficult for new participants to review historical interactions), and the general problem of overflowing email inboxes (making it increasingly challenging to triage and organize incoming messages). 

Context is a subtle but critically important facet of communication and collaboration.  The primary goal with contextual tools is to make it simpler for people to work at a level of abstraction that consistently sustains focus on real-world concepts and tasks, rather than technology details.  Contextual communication and collaboration tools can also minimize rework by unobtrusively capturing metadata in context (distinguishing between a generic email message and a customer meeting summary, for instance) and by seamlessly making other resources – people and information – available from within individuals’ preferred work settings. 

These concepts are all reasonable and intuitive.  They generally describe how people have been working together for centuries, after all, long before the advent of mixed blessings such as global email systems.  Most organizations and individuals nonetheless face considerable communication and collaboration challenges, however, and it turns out that the infrastructure and tools required to productively, reliably, robustly, and seamlessly foster contextual communication and collaboration are exceptionally deep and integrated.  In my next couple posts, I’ll explain how we got here – some of the causes of current communication/collaboration complexity and chaos – and why recent market trends are aligning to make communication/collaboration tools much more effective for managing your time and attention.

Sometimes when I get stuck, I turn to one of my favorite online resources, Wikipedia. This time, the topic was the nature of collaboration – not just the online technologies, but the concept itself.

This is a quote from their section on “Collaboration”:

Barriers To Collaboration

One opinion is that whilst collaboration is natural in some societies, and is generally natural in pre-existing teams, collaboration is unnatural in new groups and western society. Some of the perceived barriers to collaboration are:

• "stranger danger"; which can be expressed as a reluctance to share with others unknown to you
• "needle in a haystack"; people believe that others may have already solved your problem but how do you find them
• "hoarding"; where people do not want to share knowledge because they see hoarding as a source of power
• "not invented here"; self explanatory

Whilst much of the discussion around the topic of collaboration refers to the use of IT, perhaps more research is required on how to provide an effective social process that will help overcome the barriers.

Ironically, I had the opportunity to edit that section since the word “perceived” was misspelled “percieved.” Therefore, I participated in the collaborative effort that is the Wikipedia.

If you do visit the page, scroll down to the portion that talks about collaboration versus coordination and cooperation. Along with providing an interesting topic for dinner conversation among intellectuals, this can be used in discussions to find out exactly what clients really need. For example, do groups need to co-create a new product, or do they simply need to manage their document flow?

If you’re really interested in the nature of collaboration, and have the time and drive to participate in a much larger collaborative project on the nature of collaboration, visit MetaCollab. MetaCollab is a project spawned from Wikipedia that uses the collective experience of its participants to formulate a collaboration encyclopedia. It’s a bit thin at the moment, but I may invest some time to change that.

This message comes to you directly from seat 3H on board Lufthansa flight 410.  I am writing this column on my way back from Munich to New York - literally - and posting it to Collaboration Loop as we fly along at 11,000 m.  

I was in Munich for several reasons, including client meetings and to participate in BMW’s European Delivery program.  I picked up a BMW 330xi, in Sparkling Graphite. And yes, it has Bluetooth - among many other fun options.  I drove a total of 2426 km over 5 days, and visited Germany, Austria, Italy, and Hungary.  The trip also presented an opportunity for me to finally test the Lufthansa FlyNet service (powered by Connexion by Boeing). Earlier this year, Lufthansa added the service to New York flights; it has been available on the Los Angeles - Munich route for over a year now.

Unfortunately, the FlyNet service didn’t cooperate on last week’s flight to Munich, but that did allow me to get a few extra hours of sleep (Lufthansa’s seats do fold into completely flat beds which are quite comfortable).

Today, as soon as we hit cruising altitude, my computer detected Wi-Fi and I logged into FlyNet.  

Seat power outlets are located conveniently and I had a choice of U.S. or the European Schuko connection systems.  I started off with simple chores, such as checking the news (I decided NOT to grab a handful of newspapers as I boarded, opting - hoping - to see the more current online version).

With Lotus Notes replicating my mail and other databases in the background, I started receiving Sametime instant messages from colleagues.  I’m going to keep this brief - and will follow-up on the subject in future columns - but my initial experience (discounting last week’s flight) with FlyNet is very positive.  Granted, it is relatively slow (I did several speed tests and it is marginally faster than GPRS) but we ARE after all at 11,000 m cruising along at 860 km/h.

After reading some e-mail, I called home using Skype (quality was decent), checked my voicemail, upgraded iTunes, did some online banking - in short, nothing extraordinary, absent the venue.  

My neighbor, in 3J, Frau Frowein, lives in Munich and is visiting New York for the first time.  She had some questions for me, so I suggested we look online at some information.   I suggested a concert at Carnegie Hall, so we looked at the program and she and I booked a ticket for her for this Thursday.   We also e-mailed her daughter.

About 3 hours into the flight, I briefly lost the connection but the service has been flawless ever since.

Today’s flight takes place entirely during business hours in the United States. We departed at 15:15 local time, which is 09:15 in New York.  We will land at 18:25 New York time, which is 15:25 in California.  This represents an entire day - and given the pace at which the knowledge economy moves - missing one day is more than many can afford.

This is the first in a series of blog posts about the past, present, and future of communication, collaboration, and content management.  I believe we’re on the verge of unprecedented growth in related software domains, in large part because of growing communication- and information-intensity (for both personal and work contexts).  Whether for the benefit of improving personal time and attention management or the mandate, within larger organizations, to comply with increasingly stringent regulatory compliance requirements, the demand for effective communication/collaboration/content strategies is poised for explosive growth.  In this blog series, I’ll share some impressions about how we got here, some current challenges, and what’s likely to happen next.

To briefly explain my background, I’ve been working with assorted communication/collaboration tools for more than twenty years, starting with email and basic conferencing systems during the early 1980s and then into more elaborate tools such as PLATO during the mid-1980s.  I went to work at Lotus Development Corporation in the summer of 1988 and spent a decade there, mostly focused on Lotus Notes-related roles; for example, I was director of Notes product management during the pivotal Notes R4 release.  I left Lotus in 1998 to work for Ray Ozzie at Groove Networks, establishing the product management function there, and shifted into an industry analyst role about five years ago.  In my current role as a senior analyst with Burton Group, I’m fortunate to have the opportunity to work with global enterprises on their technology infrastructure challenges, often focused on the intersection of communication, collaboration, and content management.

To preview where I’m headed with my Collaboration Loop posts, I think we’re coming out of a somewhat chaotic phase for all things communication/collaboration/content-related.  Although collaborative applications (in various forms, such as groupware, teamware, and workflow) have been touted for more than two decades, there has been considerable market confusion, with vendors using neither well-defined nor consistent terminology, and decidedly mixed results for many enterprise collaboration deployments.

Communication/collaboration/content confusion was also exacerbated by incumbent vendor disruption, as IBM and Microsoft, the communication/collaboration enterprise leaders, made major changes to their related product offerings during the last five years.  IBM managed to bewilder the market about its relative emphasis on Notes/Domino and Workplace, for example, while Microsoft unceremoniously discontinued many of the features of Exchange Server 2000 that were originally positioned as “Notes-killer” capabilities in favor of new products such as Live Communications Server and Live Meeting (a web conferencing service based on Microsoft’s 2003 acquisition of PlaceWare).

Fortunately, a new model is emerging for communication/collaboration/content, one based on channels for communication, workspaces for collaboration, and a major focus on contextual communication/collaboration.  The new model, along with influential advances such as blogs and wikis, is reshaping the communication/collaboration/content landscape in fundamental ways.  My next few posts will address these changes and their implications.  We’ll review longstanding goals such as more productive collaboration projects and also review the significance of native XML data model management in leading database management systems (DBMSs), along with implications for communication/collaboration/content management.