Phil's blog

Firstly, a disclaimer. A lot of this may have already been said on the net about this subject, but since I’m coming to it as a newbie, I thought it best to put my thoughts out there first (my preconceptions if you will) and then compare with what I find on the net, or hopefully from readers’ comments on this post.

So, how do people collaborate these days? Looking back over the years, there have been things like email, instant messaging, group editing of documents, group storage of files on the LAN… things like that. Looking back even further, it was all about getting people in the same place to look at a single copy of a document and scribbling all over it, typing up a new version, and scribbling over it again until it was right.

I guess its all about the way we communicate. Email right now is ubiquitous, and it has been for a long time. Many people live in their inboxes, both in and outside of work. Its quite a formal kind of communication, replacing the sending of physical letters. Instant messaging, now that is often the preferred choice of communication for a lot of people, especially in their personal lives. Its quick, flexible and intuitive. Business often lags behind with things like instant messaging since people in charge are often worried that staff are just going to chat all day about random personal things instead of getting on with work. That may be true up to a point, but when used in a business context, it is a less formal kind of communication that people are more likely to use in lots of circumstances.

This brings me onto social networking, another thing that many companies are scared of. Now I myself have been addicted to Facebook since uni… well less so these days, but I still log on every day and see what people are up to. Thats the whole point of social networking, knowing whats going on in your network of friends. Thinking about that, especially in large organisations, that could be an invaluable source of knowledge. It is important to know what is going on around you in your company; not just in your own area/department, but what is happening around the company as a whole.

There are many ways in which companies try to inform staff of the company direction and issues that are going on, like presentations, content on the Intranet, company newspapers etc., but these are often from high up sources like directors or communicators. What I think would be useful are the views of the people that actually do the work. Imagine having a real-time feed of your network of contacts around the company that describe the issues they are facing, or the victories they are experiencing in their line of work. Now that would be a lot better surely? This may not technically be collaboration, but I think it moves people towards it. People often have the skills that could be valuable to others from around the company, and knowing what they are up to, you may be able to help them out somehow?

What if people had their profile pages, like Facebook, where they could update their thoughts at that time (obviously things like “I think I’m going to have the pizza for lunch” can easily be ignored). Also, and this is the collaboration part coming back, a place where a person could store their documents/code/worksheets/etc online. They could control the accesses to these files to restrict it to themselves, their teams, their departments, or open it up for the company to see (or maybe even public to the whole world?). Now people who can access this content will be able to edit and collaborate as a group on it á la Google Docs. Changes highlighted as being made by certain people/teams.

With social networking, people’s content is already online (photos, videos, notes) and therefore can be shared very easily. I know a lot of people who send Facebook messages or use the share feature to make their content available to others instead of sending email attachments around. Its already happening on the web, when will this kind of thing happen within the work place?

One stumbling block that I can think of, is that the corporate communications department of the company may have an issue about un-moderated statuses pinging around the company. People saying things they shouldn’t be saying e.g. someone saying that some kind of process is crap which is what the directorate may not want to publicise or something. There will have to be some kind of mass culture change to encourage transparent comms, saying things as they are and accepting that things need to be highlighted if change is going to happen. Will this dream be possible? Lets see… tell me what you think.