All Contents © 2006 Burton Group. All rights reserved.

Global Collaboration: Both Art & Science

Mike GottaPrincipal Analyst

mgotta@burtongroup.com

www.burtongroup.com

http://mikeg.typepad.com

October, 2006

2

Context Setting

• Enterprises face unique technology challenges improving productivity at a global and organizational level

• Architecture, integration, security, governance… • Efforts to improve communication, information sharing

and collaboration have not always succeeded • Nature of global work and influence of organizational dynamics

can lead to spectacular failures• IT organizations have been more risk-averse lately

• Market consolidation, cost pressures, compliance… • But the business pendulum is swinging back towards

growth and innovation putting people at the center• Interest in consumer-oriented / socially-oriented solutions

Global Collaboration: Both Art & Science

3Global Collaboration: Both Art & Science

Thesis• Communication, collaboration, and content strategies are

mission-critical• Group productivity • Process performance • Growth and innovation

• A new model is emerging• Channels for communication / spaces for collaboration • Experiences that are contextual and situational-aware• Tools which are standards-based and platform-integrated

• That increasingly spans work and lifestyle• Software and software-as-a-service• “Edge” (socially-oriented) as well as “Core” (traditional IT)

4

Agenda

• A new model• Collaboration is about teaming• Challenges faced by teams• A look at tools with a team context • Recommendations

Global Collaboration: Both Art & Science

5A New Model

Convergence

6A New Model

Content: the currency for all modes of communication and collaboration. Content lifecycle concerns include creation, storage, management, discovery, distribution, archival, and analytics.

7

Agenda

• A new model• Collaboration is about teaming• Challenges faced by teams• A look at tools with a team context • Recommendations

Global Collaboration: Both Art & Science

8

There are many types of teams • Co-located team

• Group predominantly interacts in a face-to-face manner as well as electronically, some virtual aspects but that is not the status-quo.

• Virtual team• Group interacts electronically as its primary means of communicating,

sharing information and collaborating. Face-to-face interactions occur on a semi-regular basis but that is not the primary method of working together.

• Far-flung team• Group rarely, if ever, interacts in a face-to-face manner.

• Complicated by formal boundaries and policies• Customers, partners, suppliers, etc.• Security demands, compliance demands

Collaboration Is About Teaming

9

Organizational requirements are increasingly dynamic• Teams must adapt, everyone can become virtual or far-flung at

any point

Never Assume Stability

Co-locatedTeam

Far-FlungTeam

BusinessPartnerTeam

Far-FlungTeam

VirtualTeam

Co-locatedTeam

10

Putting a team together remains more art than science…

• Culture, time and distance factors (obvious)• Team longevity (composition, team “DNA”)

• Persistent team, temporary team• Stability of team membership • Skills, competencies, experience…

• Team activities (commitment, focus and attention)• Project, process, other (community-oriented)• Nature of work (research vs. transactional)• Level and nature of involvement

• Team alignment (where does the team “fit”)• Standalone team• One team within a hierarchy or other structure of some sort• One team within a community of teams (loose affiliation)

Team Formation

11

Relationship dynamics influence team cohesiveness

• Decision Rights (“what influence over my own destiny”)• Roles and responsibilities• Internal and external structures (e.g., formal reporting)• Self-directing ownership

• Solidarity (“who has my back”)• Diversity (points of view, experience)• Trust and reciprocity• Team size, relationship dynamics and “togetherness”

• Growth Factors (“what’s in it for me”)• Mentoring and apprenticeship (bootstrapping)• Knowledge transfer • Performance measures and succession planning

After Culture, Time & Distance

12

Teams are just one type of group• Communities are another

• Communities Of Interest (related by topic, widely diverse members)• Communities Of Practice (related by methods use, membership more

boundaries and focused)• Micro-networks and teams exist within communities

• Networks facilitate connecting bonds that enable “fluidity”• Many different types: social / informational / mentor …• Strong and weak ties between group members and those outside the

group• Understanding the inter-relationship between groups and networks

(macro and micro) essential to understanding “teaming” from a leadership and followership perspective – as well as from a management viewpoint

After Culture, Time & Distance

13

Agenda

• A new model• Collaboration is about teaming• Challenges faced by teams• A look at tools with a team context • Recommendations

Global Collaboration: Both Art & Science

14

Challenge: Alleviating Fear Of Knowledge Harvesting

• Higher reliance on information sharing and collaboration tools captures a higher level of team member “know how”

• Workers feel that they are giving away their “value add”, are alienated due to physical isolation and perceive a lack of reciprocity when it comes to learning from others.

• Influencing factors include:• Insecurity related to job/role/responsibility• Lack of tools that enable acceptable levels of personal knowledge

management• Absence of management methods that acknowledge and reward

active participation and intellectual contributions at team and individual levels

• Insufficient learning opportunities

Challenges Faced By Teams

15

Challenge: Overcoming Tribes & Secret Societies

• Teams naturally evolve into formal and informal sub-groups, hierarchies and/or networks based on title, role, expertise, personal relationships, etc.

• Absence of face-to-face dialog related to work and social activities causes these problems to be more pronounced

• Influencing factors include:• No connection between agreed-upon group objectives and goals that

make participation and contribution personally relevant• Insufficient cross-dependencies between team members that

balances group and personal success• Misplaced “us” versus “them” internal competition; wrong mix of social

types, social distance and cultural nuances

Challenges Faced By Teams

16

Summary: Effective team-building

• High performing teams are skilled in two main areas• Structure: planning, readiness, roles, standardization,

synchronization… • Adaptation: improvising, creating thinking, receptive to fresh

approaches, encourage ingenuity • Solid leadership, followership, and communication are

common traits in successful virtual team environments• Engagement, explanation, and expectation setting helps prevent

teams from “getting stuck” • Influencing factors include:

• Setting clear vision/goals, consensus on objectives, and metrics• Building team identity, ensuring similar team mental models• Nurturing social contracts and feedback loops across team members• Paying attention to conflict management and resolution practices

Challenges Faced By Teams

17

Sometimes outside perspectives can help

Challenges Faced By Teams

http://www.5off5on.com/welcome.html http://www.pilobolus.com/

18

Agenda

• A new model• Collaboration is about teaming• Challenges faced by teams• A look at tools with a team context • Recommendations• Q&A

Global Collaboration: Both Art & Science

19

A Look At Tools Within A Team Context

Virtual Workspaces

• Establishes a common sharedspace for groupcoordination andinformation sharingregardless of communicationchannel

• Document libraries,group calendar, search, workflow…

Workflow

Instant Messaging

& Chat

Action Item Management

Meeting & Calendar

Management

Web Conferencing

Document Sharing

ThreadedDiscussions

VoiceConferencing

Source: Sitecape

20

A Look At Tools Within A Team Context

Wikis

• Establishes away of collaboratingthrough content

• Anyone can edit• Everything is

versioned• Conducive to

organic contentmanagement

Every pageis editable with

revisions tracked

Every pageis editable with

revisions tracked

Sidebar navigationwith search and toolbox to locate

other pages that link here

Sidebar navigationwith search and toolbox to locate

other pages that link here

Work areaswithin this wiki

Work areaswithin this wiki

BackgroundinformationBackgroundinformation

Communitymembers

Communitymembers

Source: WaterWiki, http://europeandcis.undp.org/WaterWiki/index.php/General_Water_Resources

21

Blogs

• Expanding the valueof conversation andcommunity

• Some applications can be delivered withblogs as the underlyingengine

• Disconnected supportfor blogs improving

A Look At Tools Within A Team Context

Chronologically ordered entriesChronologically ordered entries

People adding their perspectives to this

journal / diary

People adding their perspectives to this

journal / diary

Other blogs that this person or group finds

interesting and/or relevant

Other blogs that this person or group finds

interesting and/or relevant

Trackback indicator and comments

Trackback indicator and comments

22

Tags & Social Bookmarks

• Searching for community wisdom

• Tagging everything• People, content

and applications• Tag visualization and

tag mining

• For intranets, integrated withsearch, securityand identity

A Look At Tools Within A Team Context

Source: www.connotea.com

Size and colorof tags helps user

awareness

Size and colorof tags helps user

awareness

All tags are clickable with links

going to a drill down page

All tags are clickable with links

going to a drill down page

Tags can be displayed by time or

other factors

Tags can be displayed by time or

other factors

23

A Look At Tools Within A Team Context

Publish & subscribe via XML Syndication (e.g., RSS)

• Alleviatesinformationoverload andunderload

• Helps usersmanage theirattention andperipheral vision

• Communitybuilding aspects

Information items within the banking

channel

Information items within the banking

channel

Channelsubscriptions

Channelsubscriptions

Source: KnowNow

24

Presence & Location

• Establishing a perception of being connected

• Across devices, at work, on the road or even at home

• Policy and privacy concerns

• Defining a presencelife-cycle

• Publish, subscribe, discover, aggregate, broker, federate…

A Look At Tools Within A Team Context

Frappr!

Plazes

Source: IBM

25

Instant Messaging (IM)

• Value to teammembers from persistentgroup dialog

• Evolving intoa platformfor “instant”applications

A Look At Tools Within A Team Context

Source: Parlano

Federation withpublic IM systems

Federation withpublic IM systems

Long-runningconversations segmented by

channel

Long-runningconversations segmented by

channel

26

A Look At Tools Within A Team Context

Web conferencing

• Long-standingoption for groupsto collaborateover long distance

• Basic meetings,events and virtualclassrooms withrecord/playback

• Evolving into apersistence groupcollaboration space

Source: Adobe

AttendeePresenceAttendeePresence

GroupChat

GroupChat

ConferenceNotes

ConferenceNotes

27

A Look At Tools Within A Team Context

More On Record/Playback• Virtual and far flung teams often

lose important context from dailywork and social interactions

• Meeting capture applicablefor interviews, projectrequirements, milestones,lessons learned, informaltutorials…

Source: QuindiSource: YouTube

Recordface-to-face

meetings

Post toweb site

28

Social Networking

• Identifies strong and weak ties across groups (e.g., information flows), often combined with profiles that “humanize” co-workers

A Look At Tools Within A Team Context

Results orderedby social distanceResults ordered

by social distance

Organizational and profile informationOrganizational and profile information

Source: Microsoft Knowledge NetworkSource: IBM, Blue Pages

29

Agenda

• A new model• Collaboration is about teaming• Challenges faced by teams• A look at tools with a team context • Recommendations

Global Collaboration: Both Art & Science

30

Recommendations

Organizational Recommendations

• Make sure you understand the interplay across:• Team purpose, structure and activity type• Degree of coordination and activity complexity over team lifecycle• Inter-dependencies between team members and team size• Geographic dispersion, culture and management styles

• Value planning, communication & team bootstrapping:• Define clear goals, priorities, roles, responsibilities and “practices”• Pay attention to morale, engagement (motivation) and trust factors• Set expectations on behavior and performance measures; define

conflict resolution procedures• Create the right team mix, ensure team mental models are shared;

provide growth avenues that balance personal and team needs• Prioritize verbal and face-to-face communication; build social

relationships with and across team members

31

Recommendations

Technology Recommendations

• Leverage virtual workspaces and wikis to provide a common team area that centralizes shared activities and artifacts

• Exploit blogs as a means to build team and enterprise community by encouraging informal dialog and opinion

• Examine tagging and pub/sub tools to diversify communication channels and provide more flexible information discovery/delivery options for team members

• Bridge distance factors and increase team cohesion through use of real-time communication tools (including presence, location and record/playback)

• Explore use of personal profiles and social networking tools to “humanize” employees and help co-workers connect to those who share common interests, know-how and work activities