What is a collaboration platform?

A collaboration platform is a collection of tools enabling workers to perform shared work. These workers may sit in a common office or may be distributed around the globe. The workers may be employees of one company or split amongst suppliers, contractors, clients, partners, and even customers.

I use the term ‘platform’ to distinguish from a single tool or system that is dedicated to solving a defined problem. A platform, in this case, is akin to a toolbox, providing diverse tools to accomplish a wide range of tasks. It is not necessary to know the specific nature of an upcoming project in advance, because the platform is versatile and flexible by nature and can be adapted as needed to solve a breadth of challenges.

The collaboration platform may consolidate information from disparate data sources, and it may publish data for use by other systems.

The simplest modern collaboration platform is arguably the wiki. On top of the powerful wiki core can be built countless additional features, from messaging to workflow to mashup functionality.

However, for the purpose of this initial paper on collaboration platforms, I will not concentrate on any particular technology but rather the larger problem and solution. In future papers, I will examine specific technology solutions and implementation best practices to make this collaboration dream a reality.

What are emergent collaboration methods?

I use the term ‘emergent’ to describe collaboration methods that appear, or emerge, in the workplace when a particular problem is confronted. Each emergent collaboration method is uniquely tailored to work in a specific scenario, considering the project’s characteristics: the workers, their individual responsibilities, the information types used, the timeline imposed, and much more.

Emergent collaboration methods are contrasted against established collaboration methods, those that are repetitive and identical from project to project, independent of changing people and tasks.

An example of an emergent collaboration method is the use of a wiki to collect research on prime real estate locations for a new restaurant project. Three separate parties are working on the project: one group at corporate headquarters in Chicago, one group at the regional office in San Diego where the restaurant will be located, and a local real estate agent. As the groups find location alternatives, they create new pages, inserting maps of the location, demographic data on the neighborhood, and spreadsheet data calculating theoretical rent and revenue figures. This company opens a new restaurant only about twice a year, so this process and the involved parties changes from one project to the next.

An example of an established collaboration method is the approval process for new engineering drawings. After an engineer creates a drawing, he submits the drawing for review and approval by a design manager. The design manager makes changes and send the drawing back to the engineer. The engineer fixes any problems and resubmits the drawing. Once approved, the drawing is released into production. The process used in this case is standardized. It does not change from drawing to drawing.          

The Crusade for the Collaboration Grail

As project timelines compress, customer feedback expands, and coworkers and project partners spread across the globe, effective collaboration is becoming increasingly critical for managing information overload and shrinking the vast distances between teams.

Mixed Messages in a Bottle

However, despite its common importance across projects, one size of collaboration tool will not fit all. A variety of solutions will be required to satisfy wide-ranging project challenges.

Some collaboration tools will justifiably be specialized. For example, engineering groups utilize product lifecycle management systems to support the new product development process, particularly to store drawings and other important documentation and to coordinate the sharing of these resources with teams across design, manufacturing, and the supply chain. The development of product drawings and other documentation is a structured, repeatable process, thus justifying investment in a devoted system.
 

Aaargh!-uably Usable

After the implementation of dedicated systems, many collaborative jobs remain that, individually, cannot justify the investment of money or time in specialized tools. Some of these jobs have hobbled along using collaboration methods with inherent limitations. When considering weaknesses in past collaboration methods, imagine: emailing an attached presentation to a project team of twenty and asking for revisions, or important guidelines posted to the intranet inside a Word document and not searchable, or reusing a spreadsheet from the file server but forgetting to save a new version and overwriting one’s coworker’s important data. Essentially, see the section below titled “Characteristics of a Successful Collaboration Platform” and think the opposite of each of the listed characteristics.

No Treasure Map to Guide You 

Other jobs may not yet employ collaboration at all, simply because the costs involved – time, attention, and money – are greater than the potential benefits accrued. (See the book Here Comes Everybody by Clary Shirky for an expansion on the topic of decreasing organizational costs and the surprising collaborative work that emerges.)

For example, a worker at Widgetsoft Inc. is searching for academic research on the topic of under-water widget-making as applicable to his current manufacturing project. He spends four weeks on the project and compiles extensive notes and a valuable base of tacit knowledge.

He is interested in sharing the accumulated output of his work, but no one else at Widgetsoft is working on under-water widget-making right now, at least as far as he’s aware. Of course, it’s a global company and he can’t keep track of everything going on at any given time. He could send an email to the entire company, letting all 8,000 employees know about the work…

No, he’ll just keep the files on his hard drive until someone comes along asking for them.

Until the emergence of recent collaborative knowledge sharing tools, the cost of sharing this work with the entire company was prohibitive, or at least significant, often requiring a librarian in a company’s dedicated information library to manage the storage of the information and the responsibility for sharing it when and where it’s needed.

Now, with modern collaboration methods, the worker can archive his research to the company collaboration platform and five minutes later it’s accessible to the entire company via a quick and easy search.   This is a straightforward and simple example, but it illustrates well the larger point.      

The benefits of emergent collaboration methods are hard to measure because they often don’t exist yet! In the past, this collaboration was just too costly. Sharing work interactively with other individuals or groups required too much extra effort to justify the potential benefits.

But modern collaboration platforms have redefined this cost equation. They enable collaboration with less time, effort, and invested cost. In addition to opening doors to previously inaccessible collaboration, they often make the individual worker’s job easier as well, thereby providing benefits to the organization on two levels: the level of organized, coordinated work and the level of individual productivity.

The Best Thing since Sliced Spreadsheet

Simply put, the spreadsheet has been an invaluable business tool for decades because of its never-ending versatility in solving an almost limitless range of problems for its users. (Has someone written a book on the impact of spreadsheets on business?)

Despite the existence of professional, dedicated, robust software for financial analysis, the spreadsheet is still often substituted as the tool-of-choice for solving challenging problems. In theory, these problems might benefit from the more powerful, purpose-driven software solution. But in practice, the spreadsheet often wins this battle.

A user is faced with two alternatives: do I use Excel and start solving this problem immediately, or do I look for a special-purpose tool? The tool search leads to: searching, identifying alternatives, testing alternatives, learning to use the new software, finally solving the problem at hand, and lastly sharing the results.

“Send you the file? Well, the file is in the Widget 1-2-3 format so you won’t be able to open it unless you install special software. Sorry.”

Meanwhile, the spreadsheet user has once again adapted the versatile, Swiss-Army spreadsheet to solve his problem and is on to the next task.

Or, in other cases, the worker may already be experienced with dedicated software and has used it in the past to solve problems A and B. But now the worker is faced with problem C. Did the dedicated software anticipate this type of problem?

Say, for example, worker needs to analyze interest rates that stay low for a few years before ballooning to shocking levels and driving foreclosure. Unfortunately, the makers of the dedicated software did not anticipate this use case and the software is not flexible enough to compensate. So, the worker is back in the arms of his reliable spreadsheet.

It’s the People, Stupid

From a purely logical perspective, which option is better? Might the dedicated software have provided more accurate results? Might the dedicated software be faster, predicting his needs rather than forcing him to start on a blank page?

Yes, in some cases it surely would be. But the world does not work in a purely logical reality. The world works with people, who are often less than logical in practice. Reality isn’t logical, but anthropological, because a human is ultimately responsible for using any tool.

For the human, the option of using Excel is low-risk. Humans, like all animals, prefer to avoid risk by nature. The worker knows Excel, knows its capabilities and limitations, and knows, most importantly, that she’s got ten other things to do today, and she just wants to get this job done without any unexpected surprises.

Spreadsheets are transparent and intuitive, and these characteristics are comforting to its human users. If the tool is not giving the expected results, its transparent nature allows the user to easily look under the hood and see what functions are affecting the output. The functionality of spreadsheets is intuitive, in general, because all steps leading to a result are shown (until macros get involved, at least).

WWID: What Would I Do?

I have been in this spreadsheet scenario myself. While designing a conceptual next-generation mechanical linkage for a motor grader blade, I needed to quickly optimize the dimension and layout of various links to maximize range of motion and ensure sufficient force output. I chose to use a spreadsheet for this analysis rather than a powerful, dedicated kinematic plug-in for computer-aided drafting software.

Why? Simply put, because I could run one hundred variations through the spreadsheet in the time it would take me to learn just to build the model in the kinematic software. Since I didn’t need every feature of the powerful, dedicated software, its weight and advanced interface was excess overhead when I was focused on quickly finding results.

In this case, getting preliminary results quickly before reviewing the concept with our internal partner was more important than robust up-front analysis and spending months building a perfect model when the project specifications might change at any moment. The latter method is akin to building sturdy house on eroding sand. In the end, I got the job done quickly, created excitement for further work on the concept, and eventually earned my first patent.

One Million Use Cases? 

When Microsoft was creating Excel, did they have a specific use case defined that read, “User should be able to perform complicated optimization of a mechanical linkage with six degrees of freedom.”?

No, of course not. But they built the tool with flexibility in mind, leaving the method of application to the end user rather than defining the method in code.

Similarly, the most effective modern collaboration platforms avoid pre-defining components such as workflows and page layouts, but rather leave this flexibility to workers who mold the tool as needed to solve the particular problem they face in a given project.
 

Is the Benefit of Cost-Benefit Analysis Worth the Cost?

Much work done by modern knowledge workers is dynamic, changing from day to day, and not repetitive and predictable like Henry Ford’s famous assembly line.
 

For repetitive and predictable work, like that done in most manufacturing operations, investment in a monolithic system is financially justifiable. Being repetitive, the work is well-understood and the company has accumulated experience solving the problem. Being predictable, the work varies little and the system can be fine-tuned to efficiently solve just a small range of problems. Thus, calculations of the cost of implementation and the potential benefits to be gained from said system are relatively straightforward. Examples of this type of work include the manufacture of a car on an assembly line and the performance of accounting functions with an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system.   The work done by today’s knowledge workers is often encountered in a project format rather than a stream of unchanging responsibilities. The job of a given worker on the next project may bear little resemblance to his work on the last. Because of the nature of this work, some information tools will be reusable from project to project, while other tools will be entirely unique for the job at hand.

When the Tires Kick Back 

A collaboration platform, inherently flexible in its use by customers, resists simple cost-benefit analysis. It is nearly impossible to predict the myriad ways such a tool may be useful and the corresponding measurable benefits.

One challenge for measuring is due to the platform’s ever-changing users. Project partners can vary greatly from project to project, including clients, contractors, business partners, suppliers, customers, and more.

In addition to the challenges of predictive financial modeling, the short life span and dynamic nature of individual projects prevents the development of tightly tailored systems. As soon as an IT-led project could build a customized collaboration tool to fit a specific project, the workers using the system have moved on, are doing different work, and have different needs in their tools.

Knowledge works are adaptive and will utilize the tools at their disposal that allow them to do their work quickly and without wasted effort. They will resist struggling with a complicated, confusing, and slow document management system when they can email an attachment in less than thirty seconds.   The former solution imposes a significant learning curve, a barrier to adoption. Its use requires more steps to complete a task, and its operation is not transparent, predictable, and intuitive. For a new collaboration tool to have self-fueled adoption, it must ease a user’s pain-points and make her job easier.     

Characteristics of a Successful Collaboration Platform

Previously, I have illustrated the role of a collaboration platform in organizations and discussed characteristics of the platform that drive its value. Below, I have consolidated these characteristics into one list for concise review.

(This list assumes the presence of system criteria that are universally desirable, such as security, reliability, redundancy, etc.)

• Versatile
  • The platform can be used to solve a range of problems across disciplines and information types simultaneously
  • For example, the system can store and display mathematical equations as easily as maps of locations and enabling such functionality does not limit functionality for other use cases
• Flexible
  • The platform and its toolset can be molded to produce the unique functionality required of a given project, using information from outside sources as necessary, and openly sharing information with other systems as well
  • For example, the platform can be customized to fit a group’s existing workflow, or no workflow can be used at all
  • For another example, data can be entered into the platform directly or pulled from an existing data repository
• Persistent
  • The platform captures information and maintains records of the information so that the material may be reused later
  • For example, meeting minutes are archived in a shared location and all revisions of a document are stored for comparison
• Searchable
  • Information can be located without any prior knowledge of another group’s organization methodology
  • For example, a search for the term “holiday party planning” finds results whether the information is ten levels deep in the hierarchy or hidden in a PDF file
• Transparent
  • The platform’s users can see the source of information, how that information is processed, and where information is being output
  • For example, changes are tied to the user who made them
• Intuitive
  • The behavior of the platform conforms with a user’s mental model of how the system works
  • For example, deletion of one page should not automatically delete all the other pages linked from the original page

Conclusion

Let us review and summarize the main points outlined above.

The jobs done by knowledge workers are dynamic in nature. These jobs evolve continuously, and a worker’s responsibilities are often slightly – or even significantly – modified from project to project.

The nature of these jobs creates a challenging reality for systems development and investment. It is hard to build a solution for a problem that is always changing. It is hard to measure the costs and benefits of a solution that is itself always changing, assuming one even knows what to measure in the first place.

Knowledge workers will continue to require a selection of tools from which they can choose the best to get their jobs done. Some of these jobs will justify investment in specialized tools with hard-coded processes, inputs, and outputs.

Many other jobs will benefit from a multi-purpose toolbox. The tools within are flexible, intuitive, and most importantly, they enable workers to scratch their own itch.

While dedicated collaboration tools will be built to solve specific, repetitive problems, a company’s collaboration platform should not impose a pre-defined solution. Doing so will limit the platform’s usefulness in the dynamic, unpredictable reality of the workplace.

On top of improvements to existing collaboration methods, a modern, flexible collaboration platform opens the door to a whole world of new collaboration that was previously unaffordable.

This new era of collaboration carries exciting benefits for any organization: increased productivity, reductions in cost, and ultimately, by leveraging the best knowledge across internal and external groups, the development of more desirable and more profitable products and services for its customers.