At a recent collaboration conference in Boston, I listened to various users, vendors and consultants talk about implementing enterprise collaboration systems. A lot of the focus was on how technology tools can improve the flow of business processes; simple HR workflows to Six Sigma and ISO 9000 stuff.

The conference discussions got me thinking about whether collaborative processes are subject to some sort of Heisenberg uncertainty principle; a business version. (Though I figured out by the end of freshman year in college that I wasn’t meant to be a physicist, I’ve long kept an interest in the subject.)

For those who haven’t dabbled in physics, Heisenberg’s is an often quoted principle that’s a highly specialized case of what’s known as the “observer effect:” the measurement of any parameter in a physical system changes one or more other parameters in that same system. In other words, the act of measuring touches and affects the system in some way. The application of technology to business processes isn’t a perfect analog, but I hope you’ll grant me a little license.

Wikipedia talks about the observer effect as it applies to information technology: “In Information Technology, the observer effect refers to potential impact of the act of observing a process output while the process is running. For example . . . observing the performance of a CPU by running the observing program on the same CPU . . . will lead to inaccurate results.”

For a system built on information technology to be successful, you have to get a bunch of things right (call them “essentials”) that have nothing to do with the technology: strategy, processes, content, roles and responsibilities, change management. At least, that’s been SiteScape’s experience with team collaboration initiatives. I suspect IBM agrees. Dan Carroll, a biz school classmate of mine and long-time IBMer told a class gathering that IBM now considers itself first and foremost a consulting firm, not a hardware or software vendor. Consulting implies a focus on these same essentials.

What does this have to do with Professor Heisenberg or the observer effect? When we set out to help a customer collaborate better, we examine and codify the “essentials” to form a snapshot of how things are getting done today. Then we think about how they should be done if those things are going to improve. Without that understanding, we don’t know where and how to apply our marvelous technology. But, when all the essentials are overlaid with technology, don’t the essentials themselves change? My collaboration version of the observer effect.

Except in a pure self-service model, IT professionals become involved when software technology is applied to a business issue or process. By construction, the roles and responsibilities component of the essentials has now changed. New people, influences, reporting relationships, activities have been inserted into the collaborative process. An analog to one of Heisenberg’s physical systems?

If our notional implementation involves a shift from a predominately paper system to one built on software, the content changes. Paper folders can hold different kinds of stuff from software folders. Invariably, people do put different kinds of objects into those software folders.

There are lots of degrees here, to be sure. The steps to get a vacation request approved are not going to change much because you automated the system. But, in a complex business process made up of hundreds, even thousands of “states,” (Six Sigma and ISO 9000 come to mind) subtle shifts accumulate. The underlying business processes that we so carefully evaluated at the start of the project are changed as a result of our attempts to optimize them.

We’re now saddled with a moving target. As we use technology and the other essentials to optimize how different parts of an organization work together, what we need to optimize shifts.

The implication for organizations of all types and sizes is that improving collaboration and related workflow processes needs to be iterative. It can’t be one giant leap. To work, it needs to be a series – often a constant, on-going series – of steps, adjustments, reworks, additions and deletions. It’s a consultative process of listening and observing, applying lessons learned, then listening and observing some more.

At the beginning of any project or initiative, it’s critical to put in place the people and mechanisms you need for this iterative, consultative approach. Hmm, doing that kind of changes things, too.

—-posted by Tom Witkin, Director of Market Development

A long time ago (though not in a galaxy far, far away), I worked as a research analyst for a venerable global management consultancy (the original “The Firm”).  It was my first job out of college and public electronic mail hadn’t been invented yet. 

If you needed to deliver textual information over a long distance, that meant fax (thermal paper only) or Telex (raise your hand if you remember what that was).  Think of those ancient ways of communicating as types of electronic messaging, or at least pre-cursors to email.  

They were much slower than email and certainly didn’t have email’s flexibility. The output was paper, so there was no push-button way to reply.  You couldn’t attach something else to the message and forward it easily to another.  The information couldn’t be searched. The list of limitations goes on forever.  

Think about the implications of that.  A text “conversation” had to be completely serial; linear.  Creating context for the conversation meant either extra text to set the stage or spelunking through a manila file folder of old related faxes.  Hardly seemed collaborative, and worse, it was often confusing. 

One day those many years ago, a fax from the firm’s Dusseldorf office was placed in my (wooden) inbox.  It was written by a German in English and asked for everything the New York office had on “fire control systems.” That was it, period. I had no idea what to send them.  Were they interested in technology to put out fires or weapon systems to start them? There was no context. What followed was a time-consuming series of faxes back and forth to Germany. 

Now shift gears to the present day. Email has replaced fax (and certainly Telex) for text communications.  It’s infinitely faster and makes it easy to reply and forward information.   

But, what about the context problem?  If you received that same request about fire control systems via email, would you know any better what the originator wanted? Much of the back and forth communications would look just like the old days.  The only good news here is that you could resolve the context question more quickly: reply, reply. Email blasts back and forth to lots of people inside your company are often viewed by users as Spamalot. Not good. 

The application of collaborative technology has an impact on several aspects of this scenario. It shortcuts the issue of gathering, consolidating and disseminating information about those fire control systems.   

However, the transforming benefit comes from putting all the communication into context.  If the Dusseldorf request had been placed into a well designed discussion forum (that perhaps notified me via email or IM), I would have known immediately what they wanted.  How?  The mechanisms that come to mind – and there are no doubt others – are taxonomy, metadata and content. 

Taxonomy: If the request was put into an area related to public safety, I’d have known that this kind of fire control system was designed to extinguish fires.  If the request came under a military heading, the purpose would clearly have been less benign. 

Metadata:  Key words, tags, categorizations within the request would have given me the same insight regardless of where the request sat in the taxonomy. 

Content: Before the Dusseldorf office ever needed to get more data, there was probably some discussion within the German consulting team on the subject of fire control.  If the request had been part of that discussion, that, too, would have given me all the context I needed to give them an informed, on-target response. 

A valuable by-product of asking the question in context is that the answer retains the proper context.     

However you put communications into that useful framework, the effect is huge. Context ties communications to the business issue.  To me, the fewer pieces of string you need to tie things to your objective, the greater the business impact. 

People cling to messaging as a platform for collaboration. It’s comfort food and it still doesn’t work. In the context (there’s that word again) of collaboration, email and IM have to be relegated to their proper place as good ways to notify people about something that needs their involvement. The challenge is to convey the value to a user community in a way that’s visceral enough for them to recognize and internalize the benefits of doing things differently. 

That takes planning, strategy, content management, change management, understanding of processes and people relationships and lots of other things that don’t have anything to do with the technology. But, that’s another topic.

—-posted by Tom Witkin, Director of Market Development

SiteScape is a team collaboration company. So, I had mixed reactions to a recent US News & World Report piece, “’Secretary of Tech’ Is No Fan of E-mail.” The “Secretary of Tech” here is Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. (http://www.usnews.com/usnews/politics/whispers/articles/060619/19whisplead.htm).

On one hand, I agree — strongly — that email is a lousy way to communicate and discuss critical related information. Many implementations of collaboration software are intended to displace email as a collaboration platform. Lots of people try to use it for that and will forever. Email is comfort food. But, it still does a bad job helping further almost every aspect of team work. A lot of the problem stems from just what Chertoff says, “When people rely on E-mail chains, it can sometimes leave the decision maker unable to sort out good information from information that’s just plain wrong.”

Taking off my corporate hat, my alternate take was, “Terrific. We’ve got technology Neanderthals protecting us.” Now, don’t interpret any of this as political commentary. I did know Mike Chertoff in college, when he had only slightly more hair. I learned within weeks of meeting him not to engage him in political discourse. He was terrifyingly articulate (as a future prosecutor should be), and our politics? Well . . . lose, lose for me.

But on his view of email as the culprit for bad, misleading communications? I’m on Mike’s side of this one. I’d spin the US News headline to read “Homeland Security Chief Endorses Alternatives to Email for Knowledge Networking.” Maybe Chertoff didn’t actually say that, but I bet it’s what he meant. After all, I talked to him in college.

—-posted by Tom Witkin, Director of Market Development