Koral seems to have the table stakes functions for collab tools, but it also has some breakout features, including allowing the folks who submit artifact to tag items, great structured and unstructured data search, and a slick synchronization feature that allows users to drag and drop a folder to the desktop and keep artifacts sync’d. One of the breakouts in terms of the common language around the system seems to be the lack of talking about a file/folder structure. In this era of unstructured search, we’ll see these types of structures become less important as artifacts and content are structured by use or function rather than location.

Koral is onto something worth watching.

Haven’t flown for a while, so I’m not used to having 3+ hours to myself during the daytime. Wanted to get some thoughts down on collaboration.

I used to work for a company that branded itself as the Collaborative Business Experience. I never could figure out what they were doing that was particularly different that would justify us making a big splash about being newly collaborative. ‘Hi there, Mr. Client. Now we’re going to give you the collaborative business service delivery experience, which is differentiated from the non-collaborative experience I delivered yesterday by these three key factors. First…’ It wouldn’t have happened. It couldn’t have happened. The interesting thing was that the culture was already pretty collaborative. No one knew to call it that. We just delivered what we said we would the best way we knew how.

Fast forward four years, and now collaboration is now a popular industry buzzword. Whole groups of companies and informal networks have spun up around collaboration and collaborative technologies. I was listening to several presentations from the Collaborative Technologies Conference that was held in June. The people presenting at this conference offer a sharp contrast to my first experience with a collaborative experience. Obviously, the technologies around collaboration and the Internet have evolved to such an extent that we now have many more opportunities to explore various forms of collaboration. The various communities continue to innovate around various platforms. The 37 Signals guys are democratizing development in Ruby, the Foldera guys are offering a new way of enabling office/project productivity, and the IBM and Microsoft guys are doing their things. I highly recommend giving a listen to the content from this conference. There’s some good stuff that shouldn’t necessarily change the way you think about technologies, but it should make you think about the way you work… your team works… or your organization works. I think this is the most valuable item I’m taking away from all the buzz around the collaboration.

Some personal experience. Our clients are still pulling us into discussions around how to improve individual and coporate productivity. Recently, our clients are pulling us into more discussions about getting their people to work together in a more collaborative way. They may not use this language, but the questoins and businesss problems we’re being asked by senior leaders are clearly centered around getting people to work together in a more seamless way, to access, assess, and analyze information in a more real-time and simultaneous way, to do these types of activiites regardless of physical co-location.

It’s no secret that we biased toward the Microsoft technologies to solve these collaborative business problems. It’s also no secret that implementing new technologies that enable collaboration is only one of several steps to improve an organizational productivity. Among clients whom we’ve served, we’re seeing the two most important collaborative success factors are processes, culture, and leadership. No surprises.

Processes are a hard part of collaboration. Too much, and you stifle the productivity, innovation, and creativity you hope to drive out of a collaborative experience. Too few, and you can have one of two things happen:

• You could implement a bunch of tools and none will be used.
• You could implement none, and you could have a fabulously effective collaborative effort develop or you could have a fabulously ineffective morass created by only the folks who choose to dominate the collaborative exercise.

Culture is closely tied to leadership in my mind. Culture may be the corporate side, or macro-level, of leadership. Getting to a high adoption rate and to real productivity gains requires that the organizational culture be one of sharing, openess, flexibility, and speed. There are lots of resources on how to get your organization to this point but we favor the top down model where leadership drives and demonstrates the cultural characteristics of both the need for change and the personal implementation change.

A guy I used to work for used to say, ’speed of the leaders, speed of the team.’ As I moved into leadership positions, I used ot carry this saying as a responsibility I had to both the folks working for me and the folks I worked for. In the case of collaboration, leaders have to step up and demonstrate how to collaborate by collaborating themselves. They have to include others in decisions. They have to share information with team members. They have to lead by example in the use of the tools that enable collaboration.

More to come on this.

Whatever. I found myself not getting the OLAP cube to work. I had deadlines on my project. Ty had client commitments. He also had a new team member joining his project. I had been trying to get Ty to swing by my project location for a couple of days, but it was obvious that it wasn’t going to happen. So, back up plan time. Let me set the context:

• Ty had been working remote with his team through Groove… editing documents and using the secure chat that was the only chat session that the team on the client site could get through their firewall.
• Ty and I have bought hook, line, and sinker into EVDO for broadband wireless, so Ty was using Groove to collaborate with his team and he was helping me troubleshoot through the OLAP situation on IM.
• When we exhausted all options through IM, we pulled together a GoToMyPC session. While Ty and I planned his troubleshooting session on IM, he logged onto our client’s network through a GoToMyPC session and fixed the OLAP cube.

None of the three of us involved in this situation ever spoke live. We lived out this whole collaborative business experience. We lived virtual client service. How cool is that.

People: Anyone who runs a business, a business unit, a team, etc., knows that people are the reason you will succeed or fail. Having the right people will determine how well the process and technology will be leveraged to achieve the desired efficiencies and productivity. With the amazing pace of business, it’s starting to be evident that the executive who can create an environment for his/her people to achieve personal and organizational goals is going to be the leader of the pack.

Process: Putting reasonable processes in place is absolutely critical. Another critical component in process is the 80/20 rule. How well and executive can execute the 80/20 rule in their environment will determine how well processes will be adopted and efficiently executed. Again with pace of business, how well an executive will create an environment for executing and allowing feedback to improve execution will determine who’s going to succeed or fail.

Technology: Technology is fun. It’s the latest whizbang product or solution that gets my attention, and the attention of many clients with whom I’ve worked. The current challenge with budget and pace pressure is to extract more value from existing platforms and only make incremental investments for geometric gains.

Companies are able to make these types of incremental investments for geometric gains through the collaborative efforts of the lowest level employees integrating a feeback loop to upper levels of management. In the context of an employees day-to-day work, businesses have the most to gain. More thinking to come on contextual collaboration.