The Collaborative Workforce

I have been interested in online collaboration since the early days of the Internet, and as such have been an early adopter of a variety of collaboration tools. For several years, I have leveraged the best available tools whenever I had (or could create) an opportunity. As is often the case with early adoption, there have been tradeoffs to make. In most cases I've had to sacrifice some functionality, in order to gain some other capability. I experimented with early stage wikis, and created documents on first generation platforms. Mostly I found myself trying to coax someone to do something they weren't comfortable with and often were reluctant to take seriously.

In preparing for a Web 2.0 Workshop that I'll be leading next month, however, I have -- through the discovery of many new tools -- come to realize that real time collaboration over the web is ready for prime time. No longer do the best-in-class online tools fall short of the speed and functionality of desktop software. In fact, now, with the ability to work fluidly across the Internet, one could make a strong case that the online tools have exceeded the capabilities of desktop software. Functionality and workflow of these tools are at least comparable, and the advantages derived from "cloud" integration, collaborative functionality, and data syndication offer tremendous opportunities to improve the effectiveness and efficiencies of how we work within and across organizations.

While the advent of email transformed the speed of work, it also, in a way, deluded us into thinking that it made our work interactions instantaneous. In reality, while email did accelerate aspects of communication from days into seconds (which is no way insignificant), the larger part of the process, however; the creation of work product, still held significant opportunities for process improvement. Think for a moment about the amount of time you've spent sending documents back and forth, trying to coordinate an event, or futzing around with different versions of a presentation. Whether the work product is: a spreadsheet, a creative brief, a presentation, a product design, or a myriad of other things, email really only made "a connective tissue" difference in how the work got done. True online collaboration, in my opinion, is as revolutionary a development as email was in it's time, and the ramifications may be more broad reaching.

While email had a learning and adoption curve all it's own, I suspect that the adoption of collaboration in the workplace maybe even more of a challenge in some cases. Email represented a different way of distributing documents; collaboration tools represent a different way of working together, and in fact requires re-thinking how the work gets done.

Organizations that embrace new ways of collaborating, within and through semi-permeable corporate walls, will surely win advantages of efficiency and effectiveness; but in order to do so they will need to learn new ways of working and thinking. Opening up desktop software to create a file is a reflex for all but the newest of the workforce -- as is working independently or in groups that only check in at specific milestones.

If organizations want to realize the advantages of a collaborative workforce they will likely need to make deliberate efforts, and breaking old habits will be an active process.