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2 Posts tagged with the collaboration tag
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What's awesome about having companies using a single, people-centric collaboration system is that you can get a whole new level of visibility of how people work together. That means that companies can, for the first time, see data they've never seen before. Chuck mentioned this network value in the case study I wrote up over the weekend but I thought I'd share an example. A huge part of the goal of social productivity software is to unify a company and allow them to engage with each other to get work done. To achieve this, it requires a change in behaviors, not just buying some software and hoping for the best. I like how Mckinsey refers to this:

To encourage more interaction, innovation, and collaboration, companies must become more porous by continuing to break down barriers to interactions -- barriers such as hierarchies and organizational silos. Workers will exchange information if there is a fair return on sharing it and a clear value for seeking it.How cool is the word "porous?" It perfectly reflects the level of liquidity lacking in our collaboration with each other. Anyway, we recently pulled some reports out of Jive's own internal Clearspace instance to get a sense of how are working with each other. There's a ton of insight and I'll share more in other posts. Note that we're around 150 employees and have been using Clearspace for a year, but this should be pretty statistically significant. (Big props to Dan Short for pulling this together.)h3. A look at how departments engage with each other

This shows the relationship between department and space for individual pieces of content. Content created within a common space/department has been removed (e.g. content created in the marketing space by marketing individuals was removed) in order to get a better view of cross-functional hot spots.

 

I think this chart is interesting for a number of reasons, but I'm particularly struck by the level of interaction between Sales and Professional Services. As the size of the bubble suggests, this is the single most active intersection within Jive (business critical!). The Sales to PS handshake is notoriously problematic for many, many companies. Using Clearspace to support an improved Sales to Implementation process through better cross-functional collaboration has the makings of a great story.

 

 

Amount our Sales Department engages with other departments

Similar approach to the above view but in this case the overall size of the pie represents total cross-functional activity within that space and then the individual slices show the contribution of the various departments. This view shows the contribution of the sales organization to the different spaces across Jive (other than sales).

 

 

Topics that have the most cross-departmental collaboration

This is way to capture the relationship of all publishing activity across Jive relative to where it is happening. In this case, the size of each block represents total publishing activity within that space and the color shade represents the proportion (percent) of cross-departmental contribution (the darker the shade the greater the proportion of cross-department collaboration). Based on this chart, it appears that Jive collaborates the most around product concepts, product integration, new product ideas, and some other boxes too small to show up.

 

 

The cool thing is that we have several partner customers who are giving us access to their dashboard data, too so we'll be able to learn much more about the patterns and values beyond our own company. This will allow us to develop smarter ROI dashboards and perhaps develop some relevant product features.

2,997 Views 2 Comments Permalink Tags: clearspace, collaboration, departments, porous
3

  I just got done checking out Microsoft Office Live beta release over lunch and my mind has been spinning on it all afternoon.  Not for any of the reasons you might guess.  The release is actually quite predictable. It has been hailed with an equally predictable host of reviews criticizing its lack of true innovation in the midst of a Web 2.0 catalyzed collaboration renaissance as well as more courteous reviews from those established enough to know it is good business to be polite to Microsoft.

 

What has fascinated me about this release is that it illustrates how incredibly difficult it is to break away from an established paradigm of thinking.   It brings to mind a story I once read of a British colonial expedition in the northern subarctic regions of Canada.  They died from exposure to the elements and were found by some of the local Native Americans who were passing through the area on sleds.  This sounds like a typical tale of the hazards of 18th century exploration until you learn that the reason they became stuck was that they were trying to take a heavy horse drawn coach further weighted down with heavy trunks through the arctic wilderness.  One of the members of the party was of a certain status and they had brought his coach with them across the ocean on the ship.  It really makes you wonder if even one among the expedition noticed at some point that the landscape had radically changed from what they knew in England and raised his voice to question whether this de rigueur mode of transportation was still appropriate.

 

Microsoft Office Live Workspace basically extends the Office paradigm to include web services.  It wouldn't be terribly unfair to describe the core of its new functionality as allowing you to save your Word files on a hosted drive that multiple people can access (although admittedly only one at a time with notifications when it's your turn to edit) instead of on your local machine.  In their defense, Microsoft’s product managers even admit that this product is “optimized for people who use office everyday”, don't know how to upload a document, and don't want to send it via email.  The integration with Outlook is actually pretty slick, but it is held back somewhat from the fact that it only really works completely as designed if you are running a computer with a Microsoft's OS, Microsoft browser, and using the latest office suite.

 

As an expansion of Office's functionality I think Microsoft Office Live Workspace is a nice improvement and makes the products more flexible.  But, in a time when there is so much exciting innovation going on in the collaboration space it is almost painful to see the traditional document management paradigm of Sharepoint married with hosted file storage and called "collaboration".  I'm sure our intrepid explorers realized at some point after they stopped making progress that simply calling their coach a sled didn't get it unstuck.

2,702 Views 3 Comments Permalink Tags: microsoft, office, collaboration, live


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