Adventures in home working

(updated with a link to Michael’s post that works!)

Michael argues that we hide behind the need for culture change on many collaboration projects, his key point is illustrated by this example:

if a team can run a project in email then they can run one in a collaboration tool. They don’t need a change in “culture” to make the transition, they need a change in “work practice”.

Whilst it’s difficult to disagree with the point that to switch from using email to using a collaborative workspace space requires a change in working practice, I don’t agree that it doesn’t sometimes also require a change in culture.  To cite a few examples of my own: 

1. creating a shared knowledge base requires people to share expertise that they might traditionally have thought of as essential to their long term employment and to reduce the visibility of their individual contribution to maximize that of the team.  Changing this attitude requires some culture change away from individual performance and “knowledge is power” and more towards “team results matter”.
2. creating a blog that narrates your work requires significant investment of time and energy and opens up immature ideas to public scrutiny.  This requires a culture change away from “immediate results” towards “investment in the future”, “spin off innovation” and “improved quality through greater participation”.  It requires managers to encourage people to be open and take risks without fearing that this will reflect badly on them.

In my personal experience I have seen a lot of culture related issues that have stalled changes in working practice designed to improve collaboration, for example:

1. People not being comfortable with letting other team members get access to their work in progress files,  preferring instead to only provide access to published/polished information
2. People not being comfortable with producing weekly highlight reports because it exposes the peaks and troughs in the output as if it were peaks and troughs in their input,  ie some weeks they might not have any highlights at all, maybe only low lights but have been working very hard
3. People being very concerned about publishing their ideas and thought processes in discussion areas because they believe that sharing incomplete work potentially damages their reputation and that the reviewers might take control of the conversation
4. People not investing the time and energy required to submit assets to a corporate knowledge base, because the people who benefited were too far removed from the contributor and therefore there was no benefit to her

I think all of these concerns were pretty valid ones,  working through them requires the working practice change to be supported by a culture that recognize and rewards the change in working practice.  Often the cultural change that’s required isn’t immediately obvious and that in itself is a cultural issue.  A willingness to take a risk - knowing that your peers and managers are will be there to support you and not stab you in the back. 

Right now as we move to a new world of work with less job security, and a lot more external competition from free agents and BPO providers it’s not difficult for me to see why some people look for evidence of culture change BEFORE they are comfortable with working practice change.

I blogged a little about the steps I see a person going through on their journey to collaborative behavior here and the factors affecting success here.

I’m not a Office communicator user and have often wondered why Microsoft bothered with multiple products in this space.  That was until I read this post,  which described the main reasons that Office communicator is better than WLM.  The level of differentiation really surprised me and it’s had quite an impact on my thinking since about the difference between web 2.0 and enterprise 2.0.  Here’s the highlights, with a couple of extra benefits I have added in bold.

Communicator 2007 with OCS is better than using WLM because:

Its integrated with the AD, Exchange and SharePoint

• Looks up all the numbers for you, mobile, landline, home etc from contacts or the GAL
• Uses your calendar to auto set your presence state
• Takes you to their mysite on right click
• Presence globes throughout MS Office system, including SharePoint, AD, Outlook, Word, other apps etc.

Security

• Anyone can sign up for your Windows Live ID and thus pretend to be you (all it says is ‘email address not verified’
• In WLM you can change your name to someone else. All too easy to change your name and impersonate someone else.
• When you leave an organisation, your communicator buddy list stays with the company. With WLM you take that list with you
• Communicator is possible to log conversation centrally, not possible with WLM
• Because it encrypts the traffic so people can’t intercept your messages as they travel outside the firewall

Higher fidelity presence

• You can see at a glance if they are OOF before you email them or IM them
• With Communicator you have advanced presence such as ‘in call’ and ‘in a meeting’ which are set automatically
• You can tag a contact if you are looking for them
• With Communicator you can also see the presence of those that are NOT on buddy list.  This is a big one - its people you don’t know that well that you need the most presence assistance with.  I’d have to put the whole company on my buddy list to use WLM for this.

Phone integration

• Communicator integrates with your phone
• Can divert calls to the device you choose even mid call
• Communicator lets you answer the phone on your pc if you like because the two are integrated
• You can have your phone do simultaneous ring like your desk and mobile
• Via remote call control, you can see your phone calls come in even when you are not near your phone or mobile and can choose to take them via the pc or send to vmail
• Is integrated with your voicemail letting you talk to your voicemail inbox from the client
• With Communicator you can make outgoing and incoming calls from your PC. WLM only does outgoing - and its nowhere near as good quality (IMHO)
• You can click on a phone number in a document and it will phone it, you can cut and paste numbers and edit them before dialling

Enterprise management

• Communicator client is updated once every 3 or so years. WLM has a shorter refresh cycle so requires more effort to maintain in an enterprise
• You can do multi person video conferencing - don’t think you can do that with WLM
• Can IM a distribution list
• Cleaner UI, more corporate

Extras

• No adverts
• Great API for programming BOTS and other enterprise integration scenarios
• Integration with web conferencing
• Ability to switch seamlessly from peer to peer mode to client server mode once more than two participants are involved
• Works with Microsoft’s roundtable video conferencing hardware

Its a pretty impressive list,  although I think Lotus SameTime is on track to do an even better job of demonstrating just how different enterprise real-time communication is from consumer grade equivalents.

This post is dedicated to Sam - who is trying to make all this integration work in the real world!

(updated to add missing link later on in the post)

Stu has an interesting post on effective collaboration,  I think his arrows pointing in the right direction, but I don’t think its the whole story.  In Stu’s model we need to have a willing person, a willing team, the right culture (less important) and the right tools.    I think these 4 things are key for a short term activity,  in my experience pretty much any team can collaborate well given enough management attention and team enthusiasm, even if they just have a shared file system and a whiteboard.  But the real trick will collaboration is to sustain it over time and to make it work across all of the activities a person’s involved in,  not just the priority project.

For this more sustained and systematic collaboration to take hold I think culture’s more important and I think we need to drill a bit deeper into what motivates people.

In this post I described a way of thinking about the stages a person goes through to be comfortable with collaborating,  I’m no psychologist but it seems to fit my observations so far.  I stretched the idea further with this post trying to apply Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to the same discussion.

But my best post on the topic is probably this one where I took a similar approach to Stu, but looked at the challenges that we face in collaborating and tried to come up with a model to describe them all and their relative importance for different types of collaborative endeavor.  I’ve read whole books that attempt to address the topic of this post so its pretty simplistic, but it’s nice when such a big topic can be reduced to a diagram as simple as this one.

In this interesting post Mike Gotta asks “Will Microsoft Become Facebook for the Enterprise?” I think the answer is a definite YES.  Whilst I think there is a role for LinkedIn or FaceBook for inter-enterprise social networking I still think that Intra-enterprise social networking is hugely important and I think that the needs within the enterprise are much richer.  I’m pretty confident that Microsoft has everything it needs. 

SharePoint 2007 strikes me as an excellent foundation upon which to build,  its extensibility seems impressive and the fact that it already includes basic versions of all the main elements, blogs, wiki’s, personal pages and people search provides them with a great learning platform.  Mike scores Microsoft pretty poorly so far:

• Blogs:B-
• Wikis:C+
• Tag/Social Bookmark System: N/A
• Social Networking: B+
• XML Syndication: N/A (feed aggregation and management)

but my point is that it’s just a matter of time,  Microsoft has all the technology infrastructure they need, all the research, all the resources and their B- existing infrastructure is giving them all of the practical experience (Microsoft thrives in practical experience). 

I am a little surprised that Microsoft haven’t purchased NewsGator though,  it seems a perfect complement to their ambitions (both within Windows/Office Live the enterprise) and and it’s all based on their technologies.  Makes me think they must have something up their sleeves.

It won’t be long though, I suspect we won’t even have to wait for a new version of SharePoint (but I have no inside information).

Office is on the ropes,  there’s no doubt in my mind that Office 2007 is a great product, I use it every day and I would probably go so far as to say that it’s a joy to use.  That said I know it’s showing its age,  it’s just too difficult to work with virtual team members, too complex for the basic stuff I need to do - day in day out - and too centered on the specific document I’m working on rather than improving my overall personal productivity and personal knowledge management practices.  Of course with Web 2.0 and Open Source alternatives there’s now no shortage of great innovation going on that currently - in my view - complements Office, but within a year will probably be competing and I am relieved.

Relieved - because Microsoft really needed a big scare, a scare like Linux has given the Windows team, something to shake them out of their comfortable slow cycle of incremental innovation and into the real world.  I don’t think we have even seen a hint yet of what this will mean - it’s certainly a lot more than Office Live Workplace, but I am quietly confident.

Why?  because Office 2007 was all about competing with the past,  a new UI meant that the Open Source clones hit a brick wall and a new file format meant that competitors needed to spend many development cycles going nowhere implementing the incredibly complex Office XML format. 

This leaves the huge Office 14 team to focus on the future, solving the problems of inter-enterprise virtual teams, improved ad-hoc real-time collaboration, collaborative authoring, more transparent offline/online transitions with SharePoint, richer web functionality etc.  I have no doubt that Microsoft has the skills (look at SharePoint, OneNote and Excel services for example) it’s all about the motivation - and right now their motivation (loss of one of their premier cash cows) must be at an all time high.

I’m excited by the potential as well,  Office is still the most important IT tool I use and I see tremendous potential for improvement if Microsoft gets it right,  what’s equally interesting is to see that IBM are even making a serious attempt at integrating their collaboration tools with Office (Quickr and SameTime) and as a user of both that’s also very good news.  Right now Quickr seems better integrated with Windows for example than SharePoint 2007 is!

Jing is a great example of collaboration done right, quick and easy to use, with just a couple of clicks I am able to create a screencast  and share it on my blog via screencast.com.

Here’s a sample screen cast I created with Jing.

Definately worth checking out the demo, the FAQ and the blog.  Right now its free to use, so start using it now and convince your boss that its worth paying for when its out of beta!

LinkedIn reached a tipping point for me this weekend,  I got fed up of just accepting invites and decided to see if I could use it to deliver some real advantage.   This meant I had to get serious about using it:

1. Creating a proper profile with a comprehensive career history, I really like the way LinkedIn uses the career history for introductions and recommendations
2. Adding my contacts and establishing a routine for adding new contacts as I make them
3. Figuring out how to use LinkedIn to model the cross company working groups I am a member of so the members actually know about each other and can keep track of our changing roles over time
4. Making some recommendations for the people who have impressed me most throughout my career

At this point I only have about 30% of my contacts in the system, so I’m not at critical mass but already I can see the value of it, and I like the fact that I can synch it with Plaxo to keep my contact database up to date.  I’m looking forward to getting some recommendations myself and to start using the Answers functionality and making contact with some of my old colleagues.

Here’s my profile —> http://www.linkedin.com/in/steverichards

Over recent weeks I’ve been asking myself why we “hide” so much behind the firewall.  In my company for example we have recently setup or planned wiki’s, blogs, expert location systems, social tagging etc - all private.  The immediate reaction is that this is a good idea, this is confidential information, but on reflection I’m not so sure.

It seems to me that all this stuff behind the firewall is just a sub-optimal version of what’s on the Internet, lets take a few examples:

1. We have a wiki which is intended to be a knowledge base on collaboration.  Clearly this knowledge base isn’t going to compete with the information that’s already available on the web.  In fact with less than 100 users it’s not likely to get a lot of attention. If we put that same effort into an Internet accessible wiki, that’s layered on top of existing knowledge in wikipedia etc then this would get a lot more content and critique, be more accessible even for our own employees and certainly our customers and generally enhance our reputation.  Now there may be small snippets of information that are confidential, but generally this will relate only to costs and partnerships.  Most confidential information is rarely of greater competitive advantage than reputation and visibility are.
2. We have an expert location system, its sophisticated but no where near as easy to use and useful as LinkedIn would be.  If everyone was on LinkedIn we would see a lot of advantages - our customers would find it much easier to work with is, as would suppliers and partners and we would have a way for our employees to invest in building their reputations in a way that continues to be relevant if they leave, which means they would put more effort into it!  Of course it would be slightly easier for competitors to harvest information and recruiters, but it’s pretty easy for them to do that now anyway just from personal use of linkedin and blogs and of course from people they have recruited.

So my general point is that perhaps our default choice should be to make things public and to use systems that leverage the network effects of the Internet, rather than to default to private systems.  I’m sure there are challenges which ever approach we take, but it’s an interesting thought to debate.

Those of us who grew up with the co-located meeting never stopped complaining about how unproductive the experience was.  We spent years trying to improve the level of interactivity with whiteboards, flip charts, projectors and decision support systems to increase the level of participation and improve the quality of decisions. 

With the advent of virtual meeting technologies we found that not only could we reduce travel but we could actually improve the dynamics of meetings,  web conferencing made it easier for multiple participants to take a share at presenting, instant messaging made it easier to access specialists and for participants to capture thoughts and questions without disrupting the flow of the meeting.

Those of us who discovered multiple displays realized that we could improve productivity even more by using a web conference to share one screen while having video on another and reference materials readily to hand on a third screen.

Finally those of us who work from home found that they could now work in a quiet environment, without disrupting the rest of the office with noisy meetings and reduce travel to zero.

Then along comes Telepresence,  a return to the worst of the traditional meeting:

1. you now need to schedule time for a meeting, rather than just having one as the need arises
2. travel to the nearest Telepresence suite, rather than do it at your desk
3. sit in simulated round table environment optimized for seeing people, rather than an effective meeting

Of course I realize that Telepresence is not targeted at the types of meetings most of us have, its focus is on those very infrequent meetings where every subtlety of human interaction needs to be perfectly communicated, the major deal, the negotiation, the critical agreement.  That said I have two concerns:

1. Telepresence will take the focus off designing environments to deliver really effective collaboration and switch focus to simulation of an environment that delivered pretty ineffective collaboration in the first place
2. Telepresence will soak up investment that could be spent to much better effect at the desktop

For myself I think we are already very close to perfection at the desktop, to a degree that will meet the needs of all but the most demanding scenario.  Here’s my vision for desktop collaboration:

1. 3 displays - 1 for video, 1 for web conferencing and 1 for reference material
2. A high quality camera and enough bandwidth to upload video at 30 frames per second 640*480 resolution, this means that you see 4 high quality images on the monitor you designate for video.  I watch a lot of videos of talking heads at 640*480 and I find it pretty easy to engage with the person talking at this resolution and I can always full screen the image if I really need to
3.  Enough bandwidth to download 4 streams at 30FPS and 640*480.  The vast majority of my meetings have 5 or fewer attendees
4. A web conferencing solution that’s really easy to use to initiate ad-hoc meetings straight from my IM presence list (scheduled meetings are already easy)
5. A web conferencing solution that makes it easy for all attendees to easily share information with each other, I.e. less focus on the idea of a single presenter
6. An integrated high quality audio solution that provides easy recording and publishing of the meeting and that doesn’t degrade because of the web conference or the video
7. An easy way (drag and drop) to share documents, web pages, etc with participants as the meeting progresses
8. A good way for participants to type notes, questions, comments, surveys etc as the meeting progresses
9. A Tablet that allows for easy markup of shared content and the freeform interactivity of the whiteboard or flip chart

My guess is that a setup like this will cost the average home worker less than $300 per year within a couple of years, and that’s probably 1/1000 th the cost of a Telepresence environment and in most respects it provides a more effective solution.

For another similar perspective check out this article by Melanie Turek from Frost and Sullivan, where she says:

Telepresence is getting so much play these days, it’s hard not to buy into the hype. But I’m a skeptic when it comes to this high-end and high-cost equipment, which does look great, but which also solves a problem most companies don’t actually have. When it comes to video conferencing, users want a basic level of quality—not a negligible point, given how long it’s taken for the technology to deliver on that expectation. But today’s high-definition systems (and even many standard definition ones) address that issue well: They deliver TV-quality audio and video with the touch of a remote-control button. That’s all most end users really want or need.

If you are interested in the concept I described of a web conferencing solution that’s much more interactive, ie allows multiple people to share content with each other in real-time check out this solution from Perspective Labs.

Over the last few years I have paid a lot of attention to improving my happiness at work and it’s certainly paid off.  But more interesting has been the impact on my professional activities.  I work mainly in vision and strategy for a large systems integrator, my focus is on desktop services, personal productivity, PKM, application delivery and collaboration - the stuff that people spend most of the day doing.  That means if I get it wrong end-users of our services are going to feel the impact for 4 or more hours a day! 

For me that’s a big risk and a great opportunity!  if I can improve the users experience of using these IT systems, reduce the frustration, increase the fun and engagement then I can potentially enrich the lives of around a million people, perhaps only in a small way - but it makes the effort worthwhile.  One of the reasons I write this blog is to try and do the same thing but for a broader audience.

Right now life is pretty interesting with the increasing acceptance of consumerization and work life balance and integration as important issues for enterprise IT.  And Web 2.0 service availability, virtualization and smart client applications are dramatically increasing end-user choice and freedom.  We also have much richer immersive experiences being provided by technologies like Ajax, Windows Presentation Foundation, Silverlight and Flash as well as much more use of speech and video and early signs of more immersive gamer like work experiences, for example Microsoft Surface. 

I can only see things improving as we see more people working outside the office, further integration of work and personal IT, more work/life integration, and richer IT experiences.  These tech trends are combining with a workforce that is increasingly comfortable working virtually and the rapid consumerization of Telepresence like collaboration experiences will free people to work from home without the isolation.

Finally I am excited about the gradual recognition within business of the value of a happy workforce, blogs like that of the Chief Happiness Officer are showing the way and increasing number of CEO’s are evangelizing the impact that changing their culture has had on their companies success.

This report provides a useful summary of the current state of happiness at work and this workbook provides some good tips if you are feeling a bit overwhelmed by the volume of work.