IM Roadmap

Stroll on over to Mashable for their write-up on 11 different technologies that were predicted by various science fiction authors, decades or centuries ahead of their time.  Why do I bring this up?  I’ll be soon starting a new series on different collaboration technologies and use cases found in fiction, especially movies.  Most, although not all, will come from the SF genre.    So, even if you’re not a SF junkie, get used to the idea! :-)

Cheers,
Eric

Livestreaming of TEDx Charlotte

In the modern organization, every employee has a phone, an email address and a PC.  Of course.  They probably also have an enterprise chat/IM client and (unluckily?) a Blackberry.  Some companies also have a good chunk of their employees with desktop video conferencing. In mine, most also have their own personal teleconferencing line.

So. It’s time every employee should have their own, always-available webinar account. LiveMeeting, WebEx, etc. Without having to make a reservation, etc. It is unfortunately true that collaboration is still much easier, and much richer, face to face.  But web conferencing can help.  It is unfortunate that is is often metered out to select employees, or restricted to a small number of concurrent users.  If we want to achieve seamless collaboration in the enterprise, we need to make the tools facilitating that fully ubiquitous.

What are your favorite collaboration tools that you think should be part of every employee’s standard toolkit?

Cheers,
Eric

Noticed something interesting … a couple of days ago I posted about an upcoming collaboration conference in November.   They’ll be doing a pecha kucha (pronounced pa-chuch-ka) session on Enteprise 2.0 solutions (see middle of here).  If you have never seen a pecha kucha session, I highly recommend it.  No dreary PowerPoint presentations, no boring sales drones.  It’ll open your eyes to a whole new type of presenting.    There are some examples up on YouTube, and open-mic-style presentations in many cities.  Check ‘em out.

Cheers,
Eric

Interesting event coming up for folks in the Santa Clara area, hosted by the good folks at TechWeb:  “Use Collaboration to Drive Business Value: Invite HR, Sales and Marketing.”  Agenda includes:

• Business Tools and Technology Decisions: Learn about the latest in social and collaborative applications and communications technologies, and how to deal with complex challenges around integration, performance, security and compliance.
• Community Development and Management: Seasoned practitioners explore both the tactical and strategic elements of community development and management both inside your organization and with your extended network of partners and customers.
• HR Technology Strategies: Discuss how to leverage Enterprise 2.0 – your people – and how to realize business value by building on existing technology foundations to transition into a more connected and aware culture and organization.
• Social CRM: Look at how Enterprise 2.0 enables organizations to accelerate organizational performance by responding to critical customer support, innovation, and sales and marketing opportunities.

November 8-11 in Santa Clara.

Cheers,
Eric

I found an article today on the use of functional MRIs (fMRI) to determine if patients in a persistent vegetative state were actually conscious or not.  The experiments show that a small, but meaningful number were.  Aside from the profound medical and ethical questions it raises, it also highlights the amazing power of fMRI technology.

Which reminded me of any idea I had a few years ago for a psychology experiment I’d like to figure out how to conduct, perhaps using fMRI.  Previous research has shown the drivers are more distracted when holding a conversation on a cell phone.  I’ll have to dig up the articles, but I believe it’s been scientifically proven in simulators several times.  Cell phones have been shown to be more distracting than silence, than the car radio, and even more distracting than holding a conversation with a passenger.   In some cases it’s proven to cause impairment equal to or worse than drunkenness.  Well-intentioned but misguided legislation has been put on the books in many states and municipalities to require the use of hands-free devices, etc.  But more recent research shows it’s not having any effect.

So, why?  Why are hands-free devices not working?  And why are drivers more distracted when talking on the cell phone, especially compared to conversations with a passenger.  My hypothesis:  While in the conversation, the driver’s mind is subconsciously or unconsciously trying to simulate the non-verbal communications signals of the other person. Various estimates suggest that nonverbal communications (ie, body language) comprise 55%-85% of total person-to-person communications (alternatively, “…non-verbal cues had 4.3 times the effect of verbal cues.”).  So, if the brain is expecting to see the other person shrug or not, but not seeing it, it tries to recreate it on the fly.  Basically, your brain is trying to guess the other person’s body language.  It does this to help you hold up your end of the conversation.

Simulation isn’t happening (or isn’t happening as much) in conversations with passengers because you can glance over to them, or see them out of the corner of your eye.  Simulation isn’t happening (or not as much) when listening to the radio because you don’t need to say anything back – there’s no social consequence to you if you mis-guess their body language.

I’ve wanted to write this down for a while, so glad I finally did.  This is actually relevant to collaboration technologies, as you can imagine technologies which can infer, transmit or perhaps even enhance non-verbal and par- lingual language cues in a collaboration context.  After all – why do so many people prefer video conferencing over telephone, email or real-time chat?  Because they think they are having a richer conversation.   They are getting the 55+% of the message that isn’t expressed in words.

Cheers,
Eric

Technorati Tags: driving distracted, fMRI, nonverbal communications, Video Conferencing

This thread makes explicit a growing thread on IM Roadmap.  The Collaboration Business Model holds that collaboration-supporting technology is selected by understanding three areas:  knowledge exchange, division of duties, and trust relationships.   Modern society is highly mobile – physically, temporally, and generationally.  The first two are the most relevant for corporations, entrepreneurs and knowledge workers everywhere.  So – why do smartphones (BlackBerry, Palm webOS, iPhone) and tablets (iPad, others TBD) matter specifically for collaboration?  Because they give us ever greater ability to transfer knowledge and coordinate activities while, well, mobile.  While untethered from our offices and desks and instead at the moment of collaboration.  Sitting next to a client, opening a bank account.  At the construction site.  In the examination room, checking medical records with a patient.  Brainstorming product designs around the table with coworkers – in the company cafeteria.

New tools enable ever more sophisticated places and forms of collaboration.  They also change the nature of collaboration itself.  Collaboration both stretches and shrinks in time.  Long-duration collaboration relationships spanning weeks or months with sparse, infrequent interactions amongst participants (as in some open source projects).  Or intense, short-lived (nee disposable) collaboration relationships – such as reported recently where volcano-stranded passengers/strangers leveraged social media to help each other find their way home.

Long-anticipated and predicted changes are now finally come to pass.  Looking forward to continued exploration of these themes.

Cheers,
Eric

Today was the anniversary of the fateful Apollo 13 flight.  NBC’s show DateLine had a great special on the real story today.   If you can find the full episode, I highly recommend it.

At one point in the interview, Matt Lauer asks Gene Kranz if he was at all concerned that the astronauts simply could not perform the tasks that were required of them.  Cold, dehydrated, tired, hungry, 200,000 miles from Earth and performing beyond any imagineable limits of human endeavor, weren’t Gene and others at Mission Control worried that simple human error would cause another disastrous mistake up in space?  He replied simply that no, the relationships were such that you didn’t even consider that.  There was that much of a level of trust.

Trust is the important element.  I started work on a paper back in 2003 proposing a business model for collaboration.  That is, how do you figure out the right technology is right for a given business context?  What’s best for colleagues of equal status and similar expertise but separated by timezones?  What is most helpful between counterparties on a complex transaction, where they have not worked together before, but where they similarly cannot meet face to face?  We think we know the answers to these implicitly, but do we?  Research I’d done before then showed that that was not always the case.  In one particular situation we’d set up high-fidelity video conferencing links between our clients and their account managers internally, and after the initial novelty usage trailed almost completely off.  Why?

My proposal, back in 2003 and still today, is that collaboration consists of three distinct elements:

• The sharing of knowledge
• The division of duties
• Trust

… and that this is true for all human collaboration.  The exchange of information and knowledge is what is the genesis and foundation of collaboration in the first place.  Without some work out put, and hence a division of duties, it’s not collaboration – it’s just talking.  And lastly – you must trust the other party and they must trust you.  Trust in the accuracy, completeness and relevance of the information.  Trust that you are each going to do the work agreed.

Every business relationship can be defined on each of these three axes.  Further, these variables will change with time and circumstance.  So, how does this relate to technology?  A couple of examples:

• Some relationships, or situations, require detailed exchange of quantitative and high-precision data.  For these, verbally sharing that data over a video or telephone conferencing link would be both inefficient and vulnerable to error.   Email, team-based engineering tools, or even (yes) chat would be more appropriate.
• On the other hand, what about a new account management relationship?  In this case, the technology should help to establish and grow trust between the parties.  Where in-person meetings aren’t possible, go with secure, high-quality video conferencing.

Again, how do we use this business model to effect technology decisions?  Take the second example above.  Video conferencing is often more expensive than, for example, chat.  Especially if pervasive, of high definition and employing robust security.  As time goes by in the relationship, the parties know each other better and have established levels of rapport and trust.  Perhaps more collaboration-supporting communications would then move from video conferencing to phone, email or chat.  All of which are likely less expensive than video conferencing solutions/services.

The technologies available since Apollo 13 have of course evolved dramatically.  However, the events of that mission so well highlight the importance of trust in collaboration relationships that I couldn’t miss the chance to write about it.

I will be taking the PMP exam soon, so energies are focused there at the moment.  However, I’ve promised myself I’ll finally write up and publish the business model stuff.  So, more to come.

Cheers,

Eric

PS, couple great books:  Lost Moon, and Failure is Not An Option

Cornelius Fichtner, over at the PM Prepcast, has a pretty good interview with a Cisco collaboration expert on virtual team best practices.  It’s one of the audio episodes of his PM Prepcast product for people working on sitting for the PMP exam.

• PM Prepcast (High-Res):  http://www.premiumcast.com/vp/50398/16029/
• PM PrepCast (Low-Res):  http://www.premiumcast.com/vp/56318/16029/

Additional commentary and analysis of the best practices in a future IMR article, but it’s definitely worth a listen, especially if you are thinking about getting your PMP.  His training and practice material is good stuff, and very cost-effective.

Cheers,

Eric