We've used SubEthaEdit to shave hours off projects -- from building
outlines and ocnducting group meetings to revising articles. We think
it's only the first of many programs that will promote collaborative
processes. By Glenn Fleishman, Jeff Carlson and Adam Engst,
Macworld
Raytheon Polar Services Selects Alphalogix Collaboration Solutions for Instant Messaging and Web Conferencing
Raytheon Polar Services Selects Alphalogix Collaboration Solutions for Instant Messaging and Web Conferencing04/13/2005 03:26 AM Alphalogix, Inc., a leading provider of enterprise communication and
collaboration solutions and services, announced today that Raytheon
Polar Services (RPSC) has selected both its Visual Collaboration Web
Conferencing System (VCS200, and its Versona Enterprise Instant
Messaging System to support their operations in Antarctica. [PRWEB
Apr 13, 2005]
Alphalogix lowers the total cost of enterprise wide instant messaging deployment with the Versona Instant Messaging System (VIMS)
Alphalogix lowers the total cost of enterprise wide instant messaging deployment with the Versona Instant Messaging System (VIMS)05/31/2004 01:45 PM Alphalogix, Inc., a leading provider of software solutions and
services for the connected enterprise, addresses the high cost of
enterprise wide instant messaging deployment and management. With this
in mind, Alphalogix developed the Versona Instant Messaging System
(VIMS) which drastically lowers the cost of deploying and maintaining
an instant messaging infrastructure without sacrifice to capabilities
or features. This is made possible with the IM client streaming
technology used by Alphalogix in the Versona Instant Messaging System.
[PRWEB May 18, 2004]
Flickr (Flicker) photo sharing IM instant messenger instant message friendster realtime media sharing real time online community
FlashPoint launches fastest photo sharing on the Internet. Innovative Qurio Instant Photo Server allows instant photo sharing with anyone, any time, anywhere, directly from the control of your own PC.
The Language of Collaboration06/05/2005 11:27 PM Irving Wladawsky-Berger, VP of Technical Strategy and Innovation at
IBM and new to blogging, on the essence of open source, which isn't so
technical: Now, when you collaborate with your colleagues, they have
to be able to read and...
In his InfoWorld column this week, Russ Pavlicek addresses a sensitive
issue: the relationship between open source and outsourcing:
It is true that many software tasks are being farmed out to less
expensive foreign programmers, but it is false to say that open source
is responsible for this migration.
...
The presence of millions of older PCs in the world with near-zero
market value means that some of these machines will eventually work
their way into the hands of foreign computer students with limited
budgets. The availability of open-source software makes many of those
machines useful to these students -- or at least "legal."
...
The rising number of these students overseas creates the supply that
will meet the demand of some American businesses to lower software
development costs. Open-source technology did not cause this
situation, although it does allow cash-poor students to use legal
software instead of resorting to illegal copies of commercial
software.
[T
he Open Source: Boon or Bust?]
A year ago, Dave Winer accidentally included the wrong image of me in a posting on
Scripting News. The picture was, in fact, of an Indian programmer
named Nish, who had written an article on C# that I found
useful. A year ago, Nish's bio read:
...
A
few years ago a furniture company flew me down to their headquarters
to
talk to them about innovation, and to get my comments on a new product
that they'd developed for the professional services industry. This was
a company that had been honoured for years as one of America's most
innovative companies, so I wasn't sure how much I could help them.
They
ushered me first into the R&D department where I met with some
very
creative individuals who obviously knew a lot about their business,
and
about product innovation. The department featured a giant furniture
'playroom', stocked with a variety of furniture components, where
creative minds could serendipitously experiment and build makeshift
prototypes on the fly. I was impressed.
Being a consultant, the first question I asked them was about their
innovation process.
Specifically, I asked, how were customer needs, complaints and ideas
routed from the front-line customer contacts (the sales and marketing
people) to R&D. I got blank stares. New product ideas were
developed in the laboratory, it seems, and the only customer input was
from surveys and focus groups once the R&D people already had
something to show them.
An interesting discussion ensued. The gist of it was the company's
argument that customers, not being experts in furniture, don't know
what they want until they're shown something. If you were to ask them
what they want, they'd just respond "what can you offer me?" My
response was two-fold:
First, I said, you
shouldn't be asking people what furniture they want, because it's not a piece of
furniture that they're looking for, necessarily, it's the attributes and benefits that the
furniture offers that people want: Comfort, orthopedic support, mobility, prestige,
'workability'.
I described a company I had recently read about that had abolished
chairs. All the work surfaces had been raised to a comfortable
work-level while standing, and each employee had been given a
lightweight, personal 'memory cushion' to stand on that clipped to
their belt, and a pair of personal orthopedically-designed shoes
designed to make standing for long periods comfortable. In this
company, people were constantly on the move and an enormous amount of
time was spent booking meeting rooms. Now, the entire office could be
configured as ad hoc meeting areas, chairs (with their high attendant
cost and floor-space needs) could be eliminated, and mobility was
optimized. People even found that they were more productive standing
up
and constantly moving around. This was a company that understood
furniture was a means to an end, and the end for them was mobility and
flexibility, so they 'invented' tools (furniture, cushions and shoes)
that had those attributes.
Secondly, I added, you
need to use an iterative process to
elicit what people need, want and would use, a process Imperato
and Harari (in their book Jumping
the Curve)
call "Thinking the Customer Ahead". This process entails a combination
of visioning, asking a lot of 'what if' questions, and generally
helping customers imagine the future state of their own organizations
and needs, and how they would react if something new were suddenly
available. This is an inherently collaborati
ve
process, as much as it is an innovative one. Just as asking people
'what would you like to see on the company intranet?' is likely to
produce unimaginative (or no) answers, so would asking customers what
furniture they need. But if you helped them to envision what the
future
of their business would look like, and then worked from that vision to
ask an iterative set of 'what if' questions to elicit the kinds of
furniture they could imagine using effectively in that future
environment, and then collaboratively work with them to 'design' it,
then you'd be getting
somewhere.
As it turned out, the new product they had asked me to evaluate was
designed to solve a problem in the professional services industry that
had been widely talked about for a generation. Now they had an answer, but it was
an answer to yesterday's
problem, for which effective work-arounds had been found and were
still
evolving. And they had designed a product that had several critical
inconvenience factors that were show-stoppers, and which they could
have known about by spending more time talking to customers much
earlier in the process.
One of my creative suggestions to them, as a customer, was that if
they
really want to sell their top-of-the-line ergonomic chairs to CEOs,
they should give them away free to hotels and conference centres for
their meeting rooms, where CEOs hang out and where the chairs are
notoriously uncomfortable. The proviso would be that the name of the
chair be conspicuously emblazoned on each chair. I don't think they
ever took me up on the idea. I still think it would work, and pay for
itself in no time.
Specialization has created intellectual and imaginative silos in
organizations, and a recent Wharton
study written up in S+B
Magazine
has found, as I did on that trip, that these silos are a huge obstacle
to innovation: "The most effective product development and
commercialization processes encourage dynamic communication and idea
sharing among engineers, marketers, and customers...Failure to
incorporate the customer’s perspective often seriously limits the
potential financial and competitive value of corporate
innovation...Often, engineers are tucked away so far within a company
that they don’t see firsthand what customers really need."
Other key findings of the study:
over-concentration on technology and under-emphasis of
the emotional appeal of products leads to market
failure
better products result when employees are themselves
customers of the product
'anthropological research' --
visiting customers to see how
they actually use (and mis-use) products can provide huge insights on
need and innovation opportunities
when entering new markets,
having local partners 'on the
ground' can help tweak products to meet needs that are unique to that
new market
using cross-functional teams and having the R&D
people 'get out more' can help reduce 'customer
blindness'
spreading R&D efforts around the world can help
global
companies enhance their 'environmental scan' and tap into ideas and
adaptations that may not be apparent at head office
surveys
that gather data on customer behaviour are insufficient -- it's more
important to know why
customers do what they do, to determine their true wants and needs,
and
this usually requires face-to-face contact and collaborative effort to
determine
it's important to understand customers' aversion to
change, and annoyance with having too many choices, when developing
products
key qualities needed of the facilitators of dialogue
between R&D, sales and customers: humility and curiosity
This study focused mainly on new product innovation, but the same need
for collaboration with all the departments of the company, and with
customers as well, applies equally to other types of business
innovation. I like the Doblin Group's Ten Types of
Innovation, an excellent way of parsing all the innovation
opportunities open to a company:
Business model: How you make money (e.g. Dell's
pay-in-advance for a custom-made PC model).
Networks and
alliances:
How you join forces with other companies for mutual benefit
(e.g. Sara
Lee sticking strictly to branding and outsourcing all
manufacturing)
Enabling process:
How you support the company's core processes and workers (e.g.
Starbucks' premium wage and benefits packages to attract superior
staff)
Core processes: How you create and add value to your
offerings (e.g. Wal-Mart's reinvention of retailing as shelf-space
leasing)
Product performance:
How you design your core offerings (e.g. the Mercedes Smart
Car's
unique and imaginative attributes -- pictured above -- pick up the new
Feb/05 Fast Company for a
fascinating discussion of why you
won't see it in the US)
Product system: How you link and/or
provide a platform for multiple products (e.g. the Microsoft
integrated productivity suite)
Service:
How you provide value to customers and consumers beyond and around
your
products (e.g. Singapore Airlines' thoughtful and pampering
extras)
Delivery Channel: How you get your offerings to market
(e.g. Martha Stewart's multi-media ways of getting her 'home' stuff to
your home)
Brand: How you communicate your offerings (e.g. Absolut
vodka's "theme and variations' advertising concept)
Customer
experience<>: How your customers feel when they
interact with your company and its offerings (e.g. the Harley Davidson
owners' community)
Collaboration within company departments and with customers is
absolutely essential to the success of any of these ten types of
innovation. My sense, however, is that in most large organizations
collaboration (as opposed to mere coordination) is antithetical to
corporate culture, modus operandi, and hierarchical structure. That's
why many innovation advisers think innovation is best done in a
business unit separate from the main operating unit, where emphasis is
inevitably on protecting the status quo.
And that's also why I was surprised to see the results of a new
study,
by KPMG and Ipsos-Reid, of Canada's most innovative companies. Only
three of the top 10 are small-to-medium sized businesses (Research in
Motion, Westjet Airlines and Ballard Power Systems). The others
include
four of Canada's five largest telecom and broadcasting firms, its
largest grocery chain, its largest engineering firm and its largest
software distributor. And while this 'bias to big' is less noticeable
in the Innovation category than in the overall Most Admired rankings
(which are top-heavy with banks), it struck me as peculiar -- until I
read how the winners had been selected: Only the CEOs of Canada's
leading (read: biggest) corporations got to vote. It's not surprising,
then, that they picked almost exclusively other large corporations.
I
wonder what the answers would have been if they had asked customers?
Collaboration Evolves
Collaboration Evolves04/19/2004 11:15 AM New offerings address diverse enterprise needs.
IBM, Microsoft Collide on Collaboration02/05/2005 09:20 PM Analysts say the battle could determine which vendor leads the markets
for messaging, which Microsoft has traditionally led, and
collaboration, which IBM has dominated.
Oracle Blends IM, Collaboration06/14/2004 02:25 AM Oracle Collaboration Suite 3.0, aimed at the enterprise, adds an
instant messaging capability to complement the suite's e-mail, voice
mail, calendar, Web conferencing and file management features.
Best and Worst of Messaging & Collaboration in '03
Shared
objectives; Need for more than one person to be involved;
Understanding of who needs to do what by when
Shared
objectives; Need for more than one person to be involved; Mutual trust
and respect; Acknowledgment of mutual benefit of working together
Shared
objectives; Sense
of urgency and commitment; Dynamic process; Sense of belonging; Open
communication; Mutual trust and respect; Complementary, diverse skills
and knowledge; Intellectual agility
Enablers (Additional "Nice to
Haves")
Appropriate tools (see below); Problem resolution
mechanism
Frequent consultation and knowledge-sharing between
participants; Clear role definitions; Appropriate tools (see
below)
Right
mix of people; Collaboration skills and practice collaborating; Good
facilitator(s); Collaborative 'Four Practices' mindset and other
appropriate tools (see below)
Purpose of Using This
Approach
Avoid
gaps &
overlap in individuals' assigned work
Obtain
mutual
benefit by sharing or partitioning work
Achieve
collective results that the participants would be incapable of
accomplishing working alone
Desired Outcome
Efficiently-achieved results meeting objectives
Same as
for Coordination, plus savings in time and cost
Same as
for Cooperation, plus innovative, extraordinary, breakthrough results,
and collective 'we did
that!' accomplishment
Optimal Application
Harmonizing tasks, roles and schedules in simple environments and systems
Solving
problems in complicated
environments and systems
Enabling the emergence of understanding and
realization of shared visions in complex environments and systems
Examples
Project
to implement off-the-shelf IT application; Traffic flow regulation
Marriage; Operating a local community-owned utility
or grain elevator; Coping with an epidemic or catastrophe
Brainstorming to discover a dramatically better way
to do something; Jazz or theatrical improvisation; Co-creation
Appropriate Tools
Project
management tools with schedules, roles, critical path (CPM), PERT and
GANTT charts; "who will do what by when" action lists
Systems
thinking; Analytical tools (root cause analysis etc.)
Appreciative inquiry; Open Space meeting protocols;
Four Practices; Conversations; Stories
Degree of interdependence in
designing the effort's work-products (and need for physical
co-location of participants)
Minimal
Considerable
Substantial
Degree of individual latitude in
carrying out the agreed-upon design
Minimal
Considerable
Substantial
Where do teams, partnerships, think-tanks, open-source and joint
ventures fit in this
schema? The general definition
of a team is an interdependent group, which suggests that
collaborative
groups are teams, coordinated groups are not, and cooperative groups
may or may not be. Partnerships and joint ventures are both, I would
argue, primarily cooperative undertakings, whose objectives evolve
over
time. Open-source developments can run the gamut among all three types
of undertaking. So theoretically can think-tanks, though in reality
most think-tank work is solitary and not really collaborative. Even
the
work of scientists on major international projects is, I am told,
substantially individual, with a lot more coordination and cooperation
than true
collaboration.
The last two rows of the above chart may seem somewhat paradoxical. It
is relatively easy to coordinate the activities of a 'virtual' group
that must work remotely and asynchronously, and much harder (but not
impossible) to achieve virtual collaboration, especially if the
collaborators already know each other. But once the 'design' of the
collective work-product is done, the implementation work of a
coordinated group is usually very explicit, while the implementation
work of collaborators is necessarily more improvisational.
So what? Well, in many cases, collective work may be dysfunctional
because it is organized as one of these types of undertaking when what
is needed is another type. Or, based on a misunderstanding of the
nature of the collective effort, the wrong resources and tools are
provided, or the preconditions for success are not met. And
collaboration is not always a better approach than coordination or
cooperation. In situations where the Wisdom of
Crowds
is valuable (prediction, optimization and coordination problems),
independence of 'crowd' members is essential, and cooperative or
collaborative processes can lead to 'groupthink' and actually detract
from the crowd's 'wisdom'. There is nothing more frustrating than
being
invited into a supposedly empowered, collaborative team and then being
charged with a task that needs nothing more than a good project
coordinator.
It all comes down to what you are trying to accomplish. The 'Purpose
of
Using This Approach" row of this chart is therefore perhaps the most
important. A hammer, a wrench and a screwdriver are not
interchangeable
tools, and none is best for all situations.
IP telephony meets collaboration
IP telephony meets collaboration07/12/2004 09:18 AM Bridging presence awareness with IP telephony, multiple communication
devices, and applications, Siemens Information and Communication
Networks this week is rolling out Version 2.0 of its HiPath OpenScape
collaboration portal.
Collaboration Across Space (and a Wee Bit of Time)
Music Professor Chris Chafe played his celleto with
Berkeley musician Roberto Morales, left, in Wallenberg Hall during an
intercontinental jam session June 18 that took advantage of
sophisticated teleconference technology. Projected on the screen are
Hogne Moe, left, and Oyvind Berg, who "virtually" joined the concert
from the Royal Academy of Technolgy in Stockholm. The quartet played
three improvisational concerts as part of the "Point 25" project (the
title refers to the one-quarter-second delay of the Internet
broadcast) sponsored, in part, by the Wallenberg Global Learning
Network. Audience members in Stanford and Stockholm also were able to
watch each other.
PicSearch Announces Collaboration With MSN03/14/2005 05:15 PM "Picsearch announced today that it has entered into an agreement to
supply the new MSN Search service with image search services. This
means that MSN consumers may search for electronic images on the
Internet using technology made available by Picsearch."
SugarCRM Adds Collaboration04/04/2005 11:25 AM Open-source customer relationship management software developer
SugarCRM Inc. is adding several new components to extend the
capabilities of its sales, marketing and customer service
applications.
Will IBM/BEA Collaboration Rile Rivals?
Will IBM/BEA Collaboration Rile Rivals?12/02/2003 01:25 AM UPDATE: Despite analyst concerns, JCP founder Sun isn't overly
concerned that new specs will damage the standards body's, or its own,
clout.
Collaboration, Up Close and From Afar
Collaboration, Up Close and From Afar07/20/2004 11:17 AM With great regret, I bid my goodbyes yesterday to the folks at the Strong Angel II
demonstration, but I'm staying well-connected to the project in
several ways.
One is by using software that has become a crucial component to the
project, Groove, the collaboration
software that just hit its 3.0 milestone. Groove does so many things,
but at its heart is a peer-to-peer networking system, replete with
widgets and tools and fully encrypted at every level. In situations
like the ones the Strong Angel teams are modeling, security is vital
for some data even if not for all.
One of the most intriguing demonstrations on Kona has been named "Pony
Express," after the relay mail system of yesteryear, except this is
being done with WiFi, laptops and Groove. The idea is that
humanitarian assistance people in the field -- where there's no
connectivity -- could fill out forms on their laptops, gathering data
about populations and needs; then someone would drive by with a
WiFi-equipped vehicle, synchronize the Groove "workspace" containing
the data; and bring it back to the home base. This would be done again
and again, and ultimately each person in the field, not just the
people at the base, would have the most current possible data even
without a direct Internet connection.
My ongoing regret about Groove is its Windows-centricity. Ray Ozzie
and his team at Groove really should find a way to port the
application to Unix (Mac and Linux). But they've heard that from me
before...
Red Hat Summit Day 2: Good collaboration and more06/05/2005 11:36 PM Day 2 of the Red Hat Summit in New Orleans began with speeches from
Red Hat's Michael Tiemann and IBM's Irving Wladawsky-Berger. I also
caught up with free music guru John Buckman for his thoughts on making
money from music online.
Eugene Eric Kim: A Manifesto for
Collaborative Tools. This essay is a manifesto about software
for collaboration -- why the world's future depends on it, why the
current crop of tools isn't good enough, and what programmers can and
must do about it.
Collaboration Tool Helps Get the Word Out04/26/2004 07:35 AM Workshare Ltd. will release an upgrade to its namesake collaboration
software that lets enterprises manage the job of coordinating changes
to shared Microsoft Corp. Word documents by multiple authors.
Microsoft Office focuses on collaboration
Microsoft Office focuses on collaboration05/20/2004 02:16 PM AP via Seattle Post Intelligencer May 20 2004 6:22PM GMT Grok Description matches for Instant Collaboration GrokA matches for Instant Collaboration
Instant Collaboration
The following phrases have been identified by the grok system as matching this entry:
A
few years ago a furniture company flew me down to their headquarters
to
talk to them about innovation, and to get my comments on a new product
that they'd developed for the professional services industry. This was
a company that had been honoured for years as one of America's most
innovative companies, so I wasn't sure how much I could help them.
They
ushered me first into the R&D department where I met with some
very
creative individuals who obviously knew a lot about their business,
and
about product innovation. The department featured a giant furniture
'playroom', stocked with a variety of furniture components, where
creative minds could serendipitously experiment and build makeshift
prototypes on the fly. I was impressed.