Continuing the conversation with Michael Sampson regarding our PGC white paper
A few weeks ago Michael Sampson posted some thoughts on our recent white paper on persistent group chat. I thought he had some great points and I wanted to respond and continue the discussion….
A unifying client like Parlano's MindAlign is indeed one way of adding an activity-oriented layer across other tools (p.5, p.9). It isn't the only one, and vendors of alternative tools could probably make a case for why their offerings perform a similar unification role. The key point is that a team should have one technology that becomes the central place for coordination and communication; scattering it across multiple tools is counter-productive and productivity-diminishing.
We do make the point that persistent group chat is not the only approach that is an improvement over the status quo, and I agree that the ultimate solution has to provide the "best of all worlds". However, I am not convinced that a single unified client is the right answer or a practical goal any time soon. The way that a user accesses information on a regular basis depends on the type of information being accessed and how that information fits into a users daily "workflow". For example, IM clients don't work well in a browser because a user's presence would be affected when they leave that page (browser based IM is a good stopgap but not great for day-to-day usage). Yet, browser-based document repositories are practically mandatory. I think the real key is interoperation, and where possible, integration. Applications should share presence, launch other applications while retaining context, not duplicate functionality, not supplicate document stores, etc. But this does not need a single client for *all* forms of collaboration.
I think it is too simplistic to argue, on the one hand, that because email users must wade through messages of questionable value, that merely pre-organizing messages into an orderly collection of channels will resolve the issue (eg, bottom of p.6). People will still have to go through the history of what was said, and some of those contributions will be of questionable value too. The change in tool may force people to speak more to the point and increase their communications clarity, but it equally may not. As I've said before, you can't base technology decisions on the assumption of perfect usage.
Yes, it is true that channels (chat rooms) do not eliminate the need for reading past messages. And in fact, in my experience group chat results in more messages to read because people share more information (a good thing). The key is that group chat makes it easy to focus on a topic and read/participate without having to spend extra effort managing the message flow just to get what you want. Persistent group chat focuses the effort instead of requiring a user to manage a sequentially growing inbox of messages with many topics, interspersed with SPAM and non-urgent messages, and whose message bodies all contain free-form threads (thus requiring a user to find and read every email on the topic, including duplicate messages just to make sure they don't miss something).
The point is, when it is easier for a user to focus on the topics that are important to him/her, the communication is better, more productive, and in many cases more complete.
Just because organizations may not archive email and IM messages today, there is technology available to make that happen -- eg, Quest's Archive Manager for email, others for IM (p.6). *If* email and IM are archived and made "full-text searchable by the current and future members of a group", then Parlano's value differentiation is reduced.
It is important to distinguish between archiving and making information searchable in the context of day-to-day activity. There are archiving solutions on the market for email and IM but they are generally used for future audits or for accountability purposes, not as a way for a group to view past group discussions. In fact, email and IM archive solutions are typically single-user archive… meaning that "I" can request a lookup of a previous email or IM but it is not group-accessible. That is a very different use case than having ongoing group discussions on business-critical topics that are available to all current and future users to re-read at any time.
The argument in this paper for "what's beyond the inbox? ... a combination of [many technologies" is similar to the arguments I put forward in my August 2004 paper on Collaboration Software Clients. I haven't written Part 2 yet, but I still believe that the best attributes of the various tools need to be re-integrated into a new universal / unified client.
As I mentioned above, I am not convinced a universal client is practical or really the best approach. However, I would agree that as an industry we are a long way away from the level of integration, interoperability, and non-duplication that we need to see. Building MindAlign 2007 on a SIP/SIMPLE platform is very exciting because of the possibilities in provides. But, there are more exciting developments to come!
Why does the text on p.11 speak to "cross-functional conversations" and yet the image of the MindAlign client show those conversations organized by functional unit? Surely if they were cross-functional and activity-centric, the activity would be the organizing item?
Great point. The reason is that when we refer to cross-functional conversations we are referring to the ability to have cross-functional teams participate in the ongoing dialogue. What we find however is that usually a dialogue is "owned" by one team or functional group. That said, how they are organized in the channel dock is totally up to the individual… the folder structure is user-configurable and not dictated by the organization. This allows users to organize information flows in the way that is best for them and is an important aspect of the user experience. Typically no two users organize their folders the same way. The combination of allowing a user to manage their own folder structure while also creating intelligent filters that monitor channels across folders are critical elements to helping a user be more productive and more engaged in group conversation.
From p.6, "Persistent group chat lets organizations deploy thousands of business-class discussions" ... yes, indeed it does. But what's the difference between "thousands" of Notes applications, or "thousands" of SharePoint sites? From an information management perspective, if we're talking that quantity, the pre-deployment planning for what should be a separate channel and what should be done in a higher-order challenge is a key question. The balance between freedom to create and preventing information chaos is essential to get right.
Yes, agreed on this point. However, in our experience, what makes MindAlign (specifically) effective at managing hundreds or thousands of conversations have a lot to do with how the product works: vertically aligned scrollable channel dock (as opposed to horizontal tabs, URL lists, etc), unread message counts, configurable alert mechanisms (configurable by user and by channel), cross-channel filters each with its own configurable alerts, lack of multi-threaded responses, etc. While I realize that technology is not an answer to many of your points, some of the ways that we implemented these features in MindAlign (some are patented and patent-pending BTW) were done with the specific intent of supporting large-scale information needs and to overcome some of the drawbacks that reduce participation in other systems. Simply put… we think (as do our customers) that its just plain easier and more productive to follow and participate in lots of cross-functional discussions using MindAlign.
That said, and contrary to what our competition thinks, we agree that this is not something you simply drop on an organization without business-level planning regarding optimal channel structures and group membership. That's why we announced our Edge Services program last year to formalize what we have been doing for years—deep planning with our customers to make sure they get it right and don't set themselves up for information chaos. We constantly hear that this makes a huge difference in product usage and customer ROI. Did I mention that it's our competitors that think it's good enough to just set up users and let them figure it out? ;-)
