Collaboration - Contextually Communicate with your Connections
We've discussed about contextual integrated information and contextual people connections in the past weeks. The third key pillar of a collaborative ecosystem is communication mechanisms. Today, enterprises have globally dispersed office locations and teams staffed with people across these locations. Enterprise stakeholders are scattered across geographical areas. We have already seen the criticality of contextual integrated information and the correct contextual contacts to talk to. However initiating conversations or meetings with these contacts and sharing information with them is not always as straightforward and seamless as we would like it to be. Thus enabling a seamless and contextual environment that allows you to intuitively connect with your contacts and then painlessly share information with them is an imperative.
So, lets take a step back and try to really figure out how do we connect with people. This is important since it will guide us in forming principles of creating a proper people to people realtime communication and collaboration environment. We typically use one of these modes while communicating with remote co workers:
- Instant messaging (IM)
- Voice (deskphone)
- Audio/Video meet
- Mobile phone
Also, we have two primary 'methods' of communicating:
- 1:1 communications: You are talking to just one other person.
- Multiparty communications: You are in a 'meeting' with multiple attendees.
When we do meet online, we spend a a lot initial time trying to set the right context so that both (or all) attendees are in synch to have a fruitful conversation. Also, since there is no real face to face interaction the factor of interpreting subtle gestures and body language is missed out which is a key part of non verbal communication. There are larger issues when working on a shared artifact in online meetings. In face to face meetings this is not a problem since we can seamlessly move from a document that we are working on, to a whiteboard and back to the document again. The context gets implicitly transferred from document to whiteboard and back again in face to face meetings. Interjections are a natural part of the meeting discussions and are in fact essential for a meaningful dialogue. Now consider all of these in the context of an online meeting where there are either two people in separate geographical areas or a team of say 7 members with people in 3-4 different geographical areas. You begin to get the picture. In fact, most of us have had this experience all the time when attending such meetings. I dont think that we really are happy with the online meeting experiences that we have today. We rightfully would expect them to deliver an experience comparable with face to face meetings. Since meetings are just one aspect of communication, when we need to have adhoc 1:1 discussions with remote co workers or partners, we usually try to reach out to them using one of these methods: IM, Voice, A/V, Mobile etc. However there are lots of times when are unable to reach the person even after trying all these methods in a sequence and finally leave either a voicemail, an offline IM or send an email. So what has happened is that we were counting on having a conversation with someone in realtime but ended up relying on offline methods. Of course, if the person we are wanting to reach is busy or not willing to be disturbed currently, the tools we use to reach out arent going to anyways help. But if we have an urgency or critical need, this needs to be conveyed to the recipient for a as quick as possible response.
Thus, in order to have a collaborative ecosystem, we would need make sure that whatever our mode of communication (1:1 or multi party), we have to account for and address the pitfalls detailed above. The intent would be to provide an experience as close as possible like the one we have in face to face meets. A lot of UC (unified communications) products available today address these areas. Using them in the right context and extending them to provide a seamless meeting workspace that allows for multiple people to view and share the context as well as work on it in real time is an imperative. We have already seen how to leverage contextual integrated information and get the right contextual connections in the previous blogs. Channelizing these two aspects of an collaborative ecosystem into the right communication mechanisms completes the picture of the collaborative ecosystem.
