My friend Jim McGee and I have lately been prototyping a unique online problem-solving community. It’s a place where people who are mostly strangers can come together and productively work. I’ll be writing more about that in the coming weeks.
Today, I’m focused on one issue we’ve encountered – which is building the right amount of workflow into an online collaboration. To me, the right amount of collaboration is enough to guide people to do what you want them to do, but not so much to constrain them to do only that. Or to paraphrase a long-ago manager of mine “the job of the collaborators is to do exactly what I tell them – or something better.”
Enterprise 2.0 platforms generally skip workflow. Few people would think it would work well if you just invited a large group of people to a face-to-face meeting with no agenda and no planning but that’s what the typical Enterprise 2.0 online collaborative platform assumes. In most Enterprise 2.0 applications, many tools are offered (blogs, wikis, microblogs, forums, etc.) but no workflow or structuring mechanisms. You can post to your heart’s content, and comment on other people’s work, but if you want to do project management within the system, you have to cobble something together. If you want to do a particular complicated workflow, you have to cobble something together. If you want to let your collaborators invent workflows on the fly, you have to cobble something together.
The danger of tools without purpose is demonstrated, some say, by the recent decision of Google to kill off its much heralded GoogleWave. GoogleWave had a lot of capabililities, but not enough people could figure out how to use it for something they wanted to do.
On the other hand, some companies, like Cisco, have at least at times stressed the need to understand what the purpose of collaboration is, and have encouraged people to build collaboration around a specific need. And certainly, there are purpose-built tools for specific collaborative efforts, like Spigit and Imaginatik for managing collaborative innovation processes. These tools have workflows built into them. These efforts seem to me to ignore the possibility that these same people may want or need to collaborate on other tasks.
The blending of easily customizable workflows into collaboration tools seems like it is a critically needed step. I’d love to hear about collaboration tools that let people take advantage of the ability to find new people through profiles and searches and lets them craft ways of working together.
Today, I’m focused on one issue we’ve encountered – which is building the right amount of workflow into an online collaboration. To me, the right amount of collaboration is enough to guide people to do what you want them to do, but not so much to constrain them to do only that. Or to paraphrase a long-ago manager of mine “the job of the collaborators is to do exactly what I tell them – or something better.”
Ideally, there’s enough structure built in so the tool is useful, but not so much that the structure significantly reduces the chance of discovering other reasons for working with the people you encounter (beyond the reason that first brought you together) or other ways of working with them.
Enterprise 2.0 platforms generally skip workflow. Few people would think it would work well if you just invited a large group of people to a face-to-face meeting with no agenda and no planning but that’s what the typical Enterprise 2.0 online collaborative platform assumes. In most Enterprise 2.0 applications, many tools are offered (blogs, wikis, microblogs, forums, etc.) but no workflow or structuring mechanisms. You can post to your heart’s content, and comment on other people’s work, but if you want to do project management within the system, you have to cobble something together. If you want to do a particular complicated workflow, you have to cobble something together. If you want to let your collaborators invent workflows on the fly, you have to cobble something together.
The danger of tools without purpose is demonstrated, some say, by the recent decision of Google to kill off its much heralded GoogleWave. GoogleWave had a lot of capabililities, but not enough people could figure out how to use it for something they wanted to do.
On the other hand, some companies, like Cisco, have at least at times stressed the need to understand what the purpose of collaboration is, and have encouraged people to build collaboration around a specific need. And certainly, there are purpose-built tools for specific collaborative efforts, like Spigit and Imaginatik for managing collaborative innovation processes. These tools have workflows built into them. These efforts seem to me to ignore the possibility that these same people may want or need to collaborate on other tasks.
The blending of easily customizable workflows into collaboration tools seems like it is a critically needed step. I’d love to hear about collaboration tools that let people take advantage of the ability to find new people through profiles and searches and lets them craft ways of working together.
