Collaboration and Content Strategies Blog

It’s About Work

Blogger: Larry Cannell

I have been officially involved in collaborative, communication, and content technologies since 1998, the year I joined an IT group called “collaborative applications.” What this meant practically, at least initially, was that I was the only full-time person in a group of about 15 people that wasn’t working on our big Outlook/Exchange migration. Although my interest in these technologies started long before, this fortuitous career change came at about the time the market for these solutions exploded.

The mid/late-1990s saw the arrival of the Internet and, along with it, technologies like portals, collaborative workspaces, web conferencing, various systems to manage content, and, of course, search. There was a brief hiatus (very brief) during the dot-com bust and then the market started expanding again, building on the interest created by successful Web 2.0 technologies (eventually called Enterprise 2.0) like blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, and social networking.

And it’s not slowing down! For example, now we are talking about enterprise use of microblogging (i.e., Twitter, but on intranets). Google Wave is causing excitement in how it remixes communication channels and collaborative spaces in new ways. Wolfram Alpha is also garnering attention (and just what is that thing anyway?). For all intents and purposes, it looks as if the only thing we can predict in the collaborative, communication, and content (3C) technology markets is that more change is surely coming.

The Frazzled IT Manager

It’s enough to leave IT managers responsible for these technologies exasperated (frazzled even), hoping for some stability to come to these markets. For many, every time a new 3C technology emerges IT has to respond to questions from senior management or users about how they could use it (or worse, when can we get it!).

That type of pressure isn’t necessarily bad (it shows a business eager to use technology to improve themselves) but it gets exhausting when all you can do is react to these external events. And we all know old IT tools rarely go away. In many cases, the result has been a mixed-bag of technologies, with some enterprises almost drowning in tools and the cost to maintain them.

What’s the Bigger Picture?

So, I’ll ask the question: “Are we there yet?”

A better question to ask is: “Where the heck are we going!”

What bigger set of needs do these communication, collaboration, and content (3C) technologies serve? With many IT applications the bigger picture is clear. For example, finance organizations are responsible for tracking sales, monitoring purchases, setting budgets, etc. The information technology that automates these responsibilities for large enterprises comes in the form of finance systems that can be customized with modules (e.g.,accounts receivable, accounts payable, and general ledger) from large vendors like SAP or Oracle.

When an IT person, who is part of the team that operates their company’s finance system, is at a family gathering and someone asks them what they do for a living, chances are the answer is fairly straightforward: “I work with computer systems that manage our company’s finances.” Most everyone understands, or has a sense for, the business objectives of a company’s finance organization.

What’s the Bigger Picture for 3C Tools?

If you are an IT person who is part of the team that takes care of 3C technologies how do you answer the question? Unless you are part of the e-mail team or maybe the search team, the answer doesn’t come easy or it might be best to avoid any details (“I work in IT”). This is because the bigger picture, the overall business objectives of 3C tools, are not well understood.

A simple answer might be: “I take care of IT systems that help us communicate, collaborate, or manage content better.” True, but this type of answer is kind of squishy (and may only encourage more probing questions from your cousin) and can hardly be used in really important conversations, like when you are asking for project funding.

To me, the greater purpose these technologies serve is kind of simple. It’s about work. These technologies help people work better individually and with others. In particular, they help us work online better.

This is the first in a series of blog posts introducing Burton Group’s Online Workplace Framework. Stay tuned.

SaaS E-mail: Enterprises Looking, But Not Leaping

Blogger: Bill Pray

SaaS e-mail continues to generate a significant amount of interest for enterprises weary of the grind of maintaining their e-mail systems. The thought that IT can hand off the workload e-mail to a third party and focus on technologies that might make a real difference for the organization is very attractive. However, caution rules as enterprises are asking the right questions before they try SaaS e-mail. Some of these questions include:

• Can the SaaS vendor support a hybrid model of both on-premise and SaaS e-mail?
• What are the delivery options – a dedicated service, multi-tenant, or both?
• What is the real cost after the enterprise’s requirements for e-mail hygiene, security, archiving, etc. are taken into account?
• What is the support for desktop clients – Notes and Outlook?
• How rich is the webmail client experience?
• What are the offline capabilities for the webmail client?
• Does free/busy searching work across the on-premise and SaaS environments?
• Can calendars and mailboxes be delegated?
• Does the SaaS e-mail service support single sign-on?
• What are the options for anti-spam, anti-virus, message encryption, message filtering, data loss prevention, and perimeter security for the SaaS e-mail service?
• What are the archiving and e-discovery solution options?
• What mobile devices are supported and how are they supported?
• What are the options for integrated (to e-mail) third party solutions?
• What are the options for custom requirements, like e-mail templates? 
• What are the options for disaster recovery?

This is not a comprehensive list of questions, but it does give an idea of what enterprise IT e-mail gurus are thinking about when considering moving users to SaaS e-mail solution.

Enough With the Information Overload Manifestos, OK?

Blogger/Curmudgeon: Craig Roth

"Not So Fast: Sending and receiving at breakneck speed can make life queasy; a manifesto for slow communication", By John Freeman (WSJ 8/22/09 p W3), is yet another "shake you to your senses" information overload 101 article.  I found it noteworthy because it explicitly defines itself as a manifesto, two years after I explicitly noted that getting away from manifestos is what is needed to make the best of the proliferation of information and content while minimizing its worst effects on businesses and workers. (Note: I avoided guru-tense and didn't word that as "while minimizing the disastrous impact this is having on us and our ability to think and reason ..."). 

I will read the book because it's my job to read these things, but there's no need to wait since a good book already exists on the need to slow down: “In Praise of Slowness”, by Carl Honore (my review is here).

Here is the comment I entered to the article on WSJ.com:

This is a very good information overload primer - particularly the parts about making conscious decisions about where the "finite well of our attention" is focused.  But what Mr. Freeman has done is provide a manifesto at precisely the time that the opposite is needed: for all the information overload pundits to put the evangelism aside and focus on a path to improvement that embraces both sides of this debate.

Getting heads nodding by describing what "we" are doing to "ourselves" (always in guru-tense) is easy.  Nomiki (who has commented a few times here) shows that not everyone should be included in that "we" as some have learned to adapt their expectations and tool usage to minimize their info-stress while not demonizing or sacrificing what the information age has to offer. 

After my first year of covering information overload I recognized that the evangelical aspect of the narrative that "Not So Fast" follows is counterproductive.  In fact, Mr. Freeman's manifesto was published two years (give or take a week) after I published my "Manifesto-free definition of attention management". 

An excerpt: "The debate is over whether we are at a tipping point that necessitates a radical change in approach – an 'information intervention' – or just seeing an incremental but manageable increase in information velocity. Those who argue it is an incremental increase often disregard the rest of attention management as the result of unwarranted alarmist thinking.

That’s unfortunate because this emerging field has a lot to offer regardless of whether one believes that we are at a hand-wringing crisis moment or not ... What is needed, then, is a manifesto-free definition of attention management. One that doesn’t require purchase of a belief system to understand."

For those interested in a manifesto-free approach to this situation:
http://knowledgeforward.wordpress.com/2007/08/17/a-manifesto-free-definition-of-attention-management/

Collaborative Online Lists

Blogger: Larry Cannell

Everyone uses lists. Some of us are more serious about using lists but we all use them. We use them for keeping track of tasks we need to do, shopping for groceries, maintaining contact information, and in hundreds of other ways. We also use lists when we work with others (for example, on a project team or with colleagues in our workgroup). Lists are important for keeping track of the work we are doing together, for sharing information, and so forth. Collaborative online lists are simply lists that are easily accessible and can be maintained by multiple people.

Perhaps the most popular list-editor is Microsoft Excel. Of course, this use of Excel does not exercise any spreadsheet calculation feature. Excel simply makes editing lists easy. A quick browse through Microsoft’s online Excel template catalog reveals a number of list-only templates.

However, the problem with using Excel to manage a list, such as project team’s issue list, is that it is stored in a file and files can be black holes of information (recall that I hate files). Files tend to be treated as personal items and not easily shared. A project’s administrator may keep a list of issues and send it out just before a weekly meeting but that is about as much sharing as we see when lists are kept in files. Need to find out about a particular issue before the next meeting? Well then call the project administrator on the telephone.

Collaborative online lists avoid this problem by being stored online so they are easily accessible and the responsibility for updating them can be shared. The good news is you may already have the most popular online collaborative list solutions running within your intranet. Lists can be found in collaborative workspace products such as EMC/Documentum eRoom (where lists are called databases), Lotus Quickr, or Microsoft SharePoint.

If done correctly, collaborative online lists can support both emergent and hierarchical uses. For example, I know of a large company that was going through a significant downsizing. They were running SharePoint on their intranet and someone created a list to capture information about people leaving the company. It started filling with names and became quite popular. That is, until HR shut it down (I suppose there are other lessons to learn here). Nevertheless, this is a good example of an emergent online list.

Collaborative online lists can also support hierarchical use cases. For example, large development efforts often consist of many teams within a hierarchical reporting structure. Imagine having a workspace for each team and each one maintaining a list of issues in a common format. These lists could then be rolled up and consolidated to provide managers with a broad overview of all issues (yes, culturally, this may be challenging). eRoom provides a similar function with their “Enterprise Database” function.

If list items have unique URLs they are easier to reuse. For example, you could use social bookmarking systems to bookmark and tag an issue (or any type of list item) and associate them with other related web pages or sites on the intranet. This way an issue within a list can become part of a larger enterprise knowledgebase.

Collaborative online lists are a lot like wikis. I view wikis as replacing Word files and collaborative online lists as replacing lists kept in Excel files. In both cases, information is easier to access and uniquely addressable (and, hence, easier to share and recall).

However, there are a few things collaborative workspaces can learn from wikis, the biggest of which is security. Often times the default security of a collaborative workspace limits access to no one, except those specifically invited to the workspace. Wikis tend to be open from the start. However, wikis marketed to enterprises can also be tied down, just like the traditional collaborative workspace. So, this isn’t necessarily a technology problem.

Rosenberg’s Law and Exchange 2010

Blogger: Bill Pray

Scott Rosenberg offers two laws for producing software in his book Dreaming In Code:

Since every writer about software sooner or later ends up offering a law under his own name, the time has come for me, with all due humility, to present Rosendberg’s Law: Software is easy to make, except when you want it to do something new. And then, of course, there is a corollary: The only software that’s worth making is software that does something new.”  (page 268, Dreaming In Code)

Hence, the challenge for Microsoft and the Exchange 2010 release – convince customers that it does something new enough to upgrade. Microsoft announced today the Exchange 2010 Release Candidate. This means that Exchange 2010 is feature complete and now the final drive to Microsoft’s planned release to market next year begins.

Some would argue that e-mail is just e-mail, and new releases don’t add anything really new. Supporting this argument is the view that with the advancement of technologies that handle team workspaces, social software, real time communications, and unified communications – e-mail is being relegated back to the purpose for which it was originally built – simple asynchronous communication. Therefore, what does Exchange 2010 offer that previous versions don’t offer for e-mail?

Two other criticisms of Exchange 2010 also beg the question as to why a customer should upgrade: 1. To get to Exchange 2010, it is not an in-place upgrade. It is a transition – like Exchange 2007. 2. Outlook 2010 doesn’t offer enough compelling “does something new” over Outlook 2007. 

However, all of this may not matter much because Exchange 2010’s real target – it’s “something new” – is hosted delivery. Exchange 2010 is Microsoft’s attack on the enterprise Software-as-a-Service e-mail market – and it appears to be a pretty good one. The schema changes to the database that make a transition a requirement to upgrade also enable Exchange to scale and perform to the levels needed in a multi-tenant SaaS e-mail environment. While the productivity enhancements in Outlook 2010 might not be that compelling to some, the enhancements to Outlook Web Access (OWA) are more important in a SaaS delivery model. Also, the enhanced role-based management is intended to give the customer control over both their on-premise and SaaS e-mail environments. To ensure Exchange 2010 meets Microsoft’s goals for hosted solution, Microsoft shrewdly leveraged it’s Live@edu offering as a the ultimate beta site, with millions of university student users.

Microsoft is not unaware of the challenge – note the promise of co-existence with Exchange 2003 and 2007 in the announcement.  While the enhancements in Exchange 2010 may certainly benefit an enterprise’s on-premise installation, ultimately, the challenge to convince them may not matter as enterprise customers increasingly look to a new delivery model – SaaS – for e-mail. 

What to Do The Day After Information Overload Awareness Day

Blogger: Craig Roth

So, you've survived Information Overload Awareness Day.  Your eyes were opened to the stress, poor decision making, and cold hard cash being sacrificed on the altar of our always-on, always-connected, go-go-go culture.  Now what do you do?

Well, first I'd recommend coming down off the mountain a little bit and taking a view of the issue from the ground.  Consider that the proliferation of information and communication channels should not be seen entirely in the negative (the "overload" problem).  The implication is that if you don't feel the problem, someone must not have shaken you hard enough with studies on stress, the difficulty of finding things, or put a big enough number on the cost. 

Some exaggeration (or, to be more accurate, exclusive focusing on the negative) may be useful to shake people awake and scare them straight.  But there's a risk they will become hysterical or stare into space.  After all, once one can see the information apocalypse is neigh, one has to figure out what to do about it. Those who do little gain only a sense of futility; they can see what is happening but do nothing about it.  While those who do too much risk vast unintended consequences.  Social bonds and efficiency suffer when people behave selfishly to shield themselves from interruptions that are unnecessary (to them).  Short lived attempts to change etiquette result in long-term feelings of bullying and reduce the effectiveness of future attempts.  Once-a-week time-outs (of e-mail, meetings) just shift the burden to other days while avoiding a root cause of the inefficiency: messages maintaining their channel without being pulled forward or pushed back as needed.  

I believe that an organization-wide, systemic, balanced approach that aims to improve efficiency for all workers is preferable to defining the situation in negative terms which start a war in response that can have vast unintended consequences. You can do take a balanced view by starting to think about:

• A model (enterprise attention management) to organize, elicit (as an intuition pump), and communicate potential improvements that can increase the efficiency of a large number of workers (a systemic fix) rather than just personal tips on how any one person interested can help themselves
• Who are the couple of people in your organization that can have a positive impact on the attention management abilities of everyone in the company?  What can executives and owners of communication systems do that is more than what any one individual worker can do?  
• “Closed loop” rather than selfish view of interruptions.  Consider each interruption as an interaction between the interrupter and those interrupted and determining, as a whole, if it was useful to the organization. So what is a real interruption in your business?  What is "interrupted" versus "distracted" and what is an “unnecessary” interruption (does the person doing the interruption ever think their interruption is unnecessary and if not, who gets to judge)?
• How social contracts and organizational structure influence interruptions and information flows in ways that aren’t captured in overload calculations and may result in unintended consequences if disrupted
• How technology can help.  Technology is not the answer, but it’s certainly a lot of the problem and, accordingly, can be a participant in an improvement approach.  With a model in place, attentional capabilities of tools can be enumerated and used to their fullest extent to address known problems
• Teachable moments.  Much of the information overload is due to etiquette and culture, but browbeating people to change their ways has little effect.  It’s been said that you can’t force changes in culture, but yet there are certainly cases where culture has been drastically changed.  Part of the answer lies in exploiting teachable moments to make positive changes in counterproductive communication and information management behaviors
• Pacing.  Try to get a realistic idea of how much improvement you can actually target.  Even if 28% of workers’ days are wasted, 0% isn’t the proper target.  Step back and think about what the real target should be to get a realistic picture of potential cost savings. By all means, use the Basex number as an example of one extreme way of estimating it, but follow up by talking about the importance of determining a realistic goal for improvement.  Once you get executives to buy into a strategy based upon dollar savings rather than quality and speed of decision making and employee retention, you’ll be expected to prove how much you’ve saved in hard dollars later. Don't use a sum of personal observations (rather than closed-loop), depend on colloquial and self-determined definitions, or build overall angst into your number

So, it's a good thing if IOAD created an awareness that wasn't there.  But the real value comes now - the day after - when organizations struggle with how to approach something described as such an enormous problem with tendrils in sociology, psychology, physiology, technology, and business.  My recommendation is to leave the negative framing ("overload", "problem") and self-helpy, guru-talk aside.  Now is the time to recast the issue in terms of systemic efficiency that can be analyzed with a conceptual model and target improvements that are both reasonable and achievable.

Unraveling the Microsoft Word Kerfuffle

Blogger: Guy Creese

On Tuesday, a Texas U.S. District Court issued an injunction against Microsoft, saying it couldn't sell versions of Microsoft Word that "have the capability of opening a .XML, .DOCX, . or .DOCM file (an 'XML file') containing custom XML." This would seem to stop Microsoft from selling Word 2003, Word 2007, and the forthcoming Word 2010 product.  Microsoft has 60 days to appeal, and it may overturn this verdict, but it does give an IT manager pause.

So what's this all about? When Microsoft designed its XML file formats (OOXML), it included the ability to create custom schemas, somewhat akin to views in a database. The idea was that enterprises could add structured data to documents (e.g., an hCard [address] entry) without changing the underlying document schema. These custom schemas were not embedded in the document proper, but did travel along in the document .ZIP file. This meant that a document could contain multiple custom schemas: one highlighting people's names in a document, another highlighting place names, for example. This "to the side" mapping mechanism is apparently what violates i4i's patent.

ODF 1.1, the other current XML document standard, does not have such a rich custom schema mechanism, but the forthcoming ODF 1.2 standard will have a much better one. When a reporter, Kurt Mackie, called me Wednesday evening, I mused that ODF 1.2 might violate the i4i patent as well. The article reads, "The current version, ODF 1.1, doesn't use this custom XML approach, but 'ODF 1.2 will move to a similar custom schema that OOXML has, he [Guy Creese] said in a phone interview." While the quote is accurate, at this point I think I was wrong. True, ODF 1.2 supports a much richer metadata mechanism, but it's not custom XML-based, but rather RDF-based (see http://marketing.openoffice.org/ooocon2008/programme/friday_1475.pdf). The effect is somewhat the same, but the mechanism is different, and that makes all the difference, at least when it comes to patents.

How will this all play out? I'm not sure--and my impression is no one knows for sure.

E-mail: A Primary Culprit in Information Overload

Blogger: Bill Pray

E-mail is often fingered as the main culprit in contributing to information overload. The previous post by Craig Roth explains that most of the material produced on information overload “overstates the problem while understating the solution.” More importantly, Craig makes a call-to-action to consider what to actually do about information overload. An article from Computerworld yesterday highlights one CIO’s efforts to do something about information overload by tackling e-mail first.

In the article, CIO Tony Murabito of Cubist Pharmaceuticals Inc. explains how the investment of $50,000 in “training employees how to better use one of the basic tools of the modern office” is paying off. I applaud the effort and would like to add the following observations:

• While the goal of cutting e-mail traffic by 25% gives the organization a target, it could be a problem in that it is a number and numbers don’t take into account the content and importance. Perhaps a better goal would be to focus on the efficient use of e-mail that eliminates unnecessary traffic as defined by business use cases. While this is harder to measure than 25%, it does change the focus from a number to efficiency.
• Some of the e-mail regime bullets are “menial” (as Craig describes in his post): Putting non-business related messages on the corporate intranet, limiting send to all capability, stopping acknowledgment of CCs, and stopping the sending e-mails that say “Thanks” may be helpful - but the impact is limited.
• The other e-mail regime bullets are good: Effective use of the subject line, adopting the ABC format (action, background, close) for e-mails, increasing the in-box refresh interval, and routing e-mails to folders other than the in-box.
• The productivity and ROI numbers are interesting, but one has to be careful. These are soft ROI numbers in that they are nearly impossible to actually measure. The estimated recovery of 15 to 20 days per employee annually is just that – an estimate – and there is no guarantee that the employee will use that time to be “more productive.”
• The increased performance of e-mail system is something that can be measured and provides solid justification for the business case for the $50,000 spend.
• It is very important to have someone like Tony Murabito to champion the cause in the organization in order to make real change happen. Having the CIO involved in creating and backing the business case to tackle information overload is a key to success.
• Deleting e-mail is problematic. Archiving with tiered storage is better. Over time, best practices from the e-mail regime will help eliminate the need for the e-mail deletion policies as described in the article.
• Learning from the effort is fantastic – Tony’s takeaway that better document management tools are needed show that the information overload problem extends beyond just e-mail.

Overall, Cubist Pharmaceuticals is good example of tackling the information overload problem head-on and actually doing something about it - and a good place to start is e-mail.

Why I'm Dreading Information Overload Awareness Day

Blogger: Craig Roth

The inaugural Information Overload Awareness Day is being held on Wednesday (8/12/09).  And I'm dreading it.  That may seem odd since I cover this topic as an industry analyst and any additional attention on my space is a good thing.  Also, I agree that too many people aren't aware of how far down the slippery slope they've gone in terms of being interruptible at all times and trying to follow ever more information sources and communication channels.

The reason I'm dreading this is that most of the material I've seen from the folks putting this on overstates the problem while understating the solution.  So on one hand the problem is inflated to encompass insidious damage to our (worded in first-person guru tense) psyche, attention spans, and well-being, not to mention about $1 trillion per year (I dispute this).  And on the other hand the solutions offered up are menial: don't use "reply all", try e-mail-free Fridays (yuk), and a smattering of time management and e-etiquette tips.  That's all fine for individuals (I offer my own personal attention management tips here, and Lifehack.org and 43 folders are full of tips).  But a systemic problem requires a systemic solution.

To their defense, I'm not the target audience for this information.  As it says in the title, the point of the day is "awareness".  To make people aware it helps to shake people awake with a narrative tying the rise of communication technology to ADD to the broad arc of information work.  I've given that presentation myself and, I'll be honest, it's rewarding to do!  I got a very good response too, but after seeing many others do the same thing I realized it's like shooting fish in a barrel.

So I'm already aware.  In fact, I've become a connoisseur of info overload articles, books, and presentations.  I feel like a movie critic who has seen every fish-out-of-water, buddy cop movie, making him disgruntled when a new release rehashes the cliche without offering anything new (even though the audience consists of people who are seeing the cliche for the first time and like it). 

The tough part is not putting on a day where you raise awareness of information overload, but figuring out what to do the day after.  That's the day when the evangelical zeal wears off and you try describing this to your co-workers, many of whom honestly don't feel that overloaded most of the time.  You can make a few personal behavioral changes and convince some others to do the same, but they have little impact and wear off soon.  And then you catch yourself interrupting people because you actually need to and they "tsk tsk" you saying it was unnecessary to them.  Then you find that of the 28% of your day that is supposedly wasted, really only a few percent of it can truly be recovered without treating every day like a nine hour sprint. Without any real solutions to survive the information deluge you come off like someone complaining about the weather.  "Bring an umbrella" as the morning show weatherman says over and over ad nauseam.

Enjoy Information Overload Awareness Day if you're new to the subject, but the next day think about real actions that can be taken.  Think about a systemic solution, like Enterprise Attention Management which describes how to pull important information forward and push less important information back.  EAM avoids the moralizing about what you're doing to yourself and others and doesn't require adherents to be converts.  It shifts the focus to enterprise-wide efficiency rather than individual struggle.