No single technology can accommodate the complex processes and cultural ramifications of collaborative interactions. Success results from using the right balance of face-to-face meetings and technology. Furthermore, the technologies used must be appropriate to each kind of interaction.
“Talking to people goes a long way and tools can go a long way,” says Andreas Dohmen, vice-president for European channels at Cisco. “The key to success is having a balance between good old-fashioned face-to-face meetings and tools that support the process and make it more efficient.”
Trying to work together remotely goes against our natural human instincts. Ceri Roderick, a partner at Pearn Kandola, occupational psychologists, explains that human beings are optimally evolved to talk at a range of about five feet in groups of no more than 90 people. “We respond to a rich stream of information and judge nuances,” he says. “This enables us to assess people’s motives, trustworthiness and reliability. As organisations become larger, more global and more dispersed we stretch the parameters and make life difficult for ourselves.”
The objective of technology is to replicate that rich stream of information when the communication is particularly important, such as building relationships and trust, solving problems and reviewing progress. This means operating in real-time and combining as many forms of communication as possible, such as images, voice and text. Called “unified communications”, it is made possible by the latest internet-based technologies. These combine to give much more information to provide more context to the exchange.
Mr Roderick advises organisations starting a new collaboration to invest some time in getting together to establish ground rules and build relationships before people have to make pressured decisions against the clock. He also advises virtual teams to meet occasionally, enabling them to understand more about the personal and cultural context of the other individuals. This helps when they subsequently work together remotely.
If people want to build trust and relationships without the time and cost of travel, then video conferencing is the most effective tool. “The purpose of many video conferences is not necessarily to get things done but to build trust and contacts in the relationship,” says Jeffrey Mann, vice-president of research at Gartner, the analyst. “Video and web conferencing are really relationship building, and not necessarily information passing or for agenda point processing, because people want to know who they are dealing with.”
A dramatic rise in the use of video conferencing has been forecast for more than 10 years, but has failed to materialise. Professor Peter Cochrane, a futurologist and founder of ConceptLabs, puts this failure down to bad video quality, bad sound quality, no eye contact, no gaze awareness, no body language, people images that are too small and no depth of field.
“Most of this can now be fixed,” he says, “notably by Cisco Telepresence, which uses life-size high definition screens, audio straight out of the speaker’s mouth from the right direction, eye contact and all in good quality. Hollywood discovered the value of emotions, for which good audio and video are the essential.”
Dieter Hertweck, professor of electronic business at the Heilbronn University, warns that people must plan virtual meetings and make them much more structured. “The technology will punish you if the organisation is very poor,” he says. “If you plan it properly, you can mirror physical meetings and you get a rich reward.”
However, asynchronous communication, where people interact over a period of time, is also a very valuable tool. It is perfect for sending information and exploits the benefits of working between time zones.
But users want to be able to choose from a variety of electronic tools. Prof Hertweck says that for the last three years, the quality of technology has been sufficient to enable everyday collaboration across national borders. “A lot of people around the world are finding new ideas and new ways to use the tools” he says.
David Farrell, vice-president for Lotus Software at IBM Europe, advises organisations to take a “Darwinian” approach to which tools to use. “The value is maximised when employees design and build applications and communities themselves,” he says. “We use things because of peer influence, so they should not be mandated. If you get them into the system, the tools that add value to employees are the ones that will be adopted.”
Ease of use is critical to the widespread adoption of software, which is essential for successful collaboration. Mr Dohmen warns that people switch off if they are not using a tool within the first ten minutes. “The interface must not be over-designed,” he warns. “People try to put too much into one web page or one tool.”
Andy Chew, vice-president of unified communications at Siemens, says that collaboration should not only be as natural and seamless to open as possible, but should happen from within business processes and their business applications, rather than as a separate process. “Technology has to be intuitive and fit within people’s natural behaviour patterns and ways of working,” he argues, “rather than force fitting their actions to the application.”
Mr Farrell agrees, saying that customers want a single interface from which to work. “Customers are driving hard to have access to all the right people to work with and the right content from wherever they are,” he says.
Mr Mann warns that the old idea of “dumping” technology on people just does not work. “It must be tied in with the task and the process,” he says, “and people must be trained and convinced to use it. Otherwise it will end up not being used or will be used in the wrong way.”
Although a wide range of corporate technologies exist to overcome some of the cultural issues surrounding collaborative working, a new range of consumer-based technologies are beginning to establish themselves in the enterprise. Often referred to as “Web 2.0”, these include social networks, WiKis and blogs.
“Youth culture and Web 2.0 will influence the technology infrastructures of the future,” says Ashish Kumar, chief technical officer at Avenade, a consultancy jointly owned by Accenture and Microsoft. “The next generation of employees expects the same level of online collaboration at work that they see in their personal life. It is a major challenge for businesses to provide tools and working environments that the younger generation do not find antiquated, out of date and unproductive.”
Mr Farrell says that organisations are now viewing Web 2.0 and social software as a “must have” to attract the next generation of knowledge workers. They are very serious about being perceived as innovative and able to provide their employees with the best tools.
Clive Longbottom, a director at Quocirca, the analyst, warns that consumer technologies lack the enterprise functionality, like access control and audit trails, so compliance is not possible. “Specific enterprise versions need to be obtained,” he says, “such as Microsoft Live Communication Server and Office Communications Server and IBM Lotus Sametime or Facetime. They can be easily integrated into existing solutions.”
He also recommends that organisations develop a written, yet dynamic, set of policies over the use of collaborative tools. For example, instant messaging should not be used for contract negotiation and work experiences should not be discussed on external websites. “The idea is to empower employees, customers and partners to interact in the way that they want,” he says, “and yet to optimise risk and value for the organisation.”
