As I mentioned last week, I went to the Aquitaine forum on the digital economy where I could attend (among other things) an interesting workshop on ‘Optimising collaborative working and the organisation of information’.
It was a very interesting topic, and it made a definite contribution, even if I’m still a little hungry, given that we only covered the whole subject from Microsoft’s point of view. In fact, we were treated to the gospel according to Redmond, which, whatever you think about it, is not without interest either.
Collaboration according to Microsoft
I was interested in the direction Microsoft was taking when it launched its ‘people ready’ campaign, even though the presentation given at the ‘web 2.0 strategy’ conference left me wanting more because it lacked concrete elements and was a little too general. Here we had something concrete, including the latest versions of Office and Sharepoint.
Microsoft’s premise is that the wealth of a company is its people, and that whatever tools are made available, it is always the individual who will make the difference. The ‘people ready’ concept therefore involves ‘giving everyone the means to create value using intelligent tools’.
With related issues: the boundary between professional and personal lives is becoming blurred, we work at our own pace, we create a lot of documents but struggle to find them (30% of time is spent looking for documents, 30% redoing what we haven’t found, so 60% of time could be optimised), and we find it hard to share documents.
Microsoft is also starting from another observation: email, instant messaging, blogs and wikis are used routinely by a new generation arriving in the company. That sounds vaguely familiar ...
Of course, with everyone working on Office, the in-house office suite has to be the cornerstone of a working environment that allows documents to be shared.
The idea is to put the individual at the heart of the organisation and the system by making it easier to use the solutions and by making them more efficient through a portal. While we spend most of our time managing resources, a little managing processes and even less creating value, the aim is to invert the pyramid so that value creation represents the bulk of working time.
To put all this to music, and enable the creation of an ad hoc portal, Sharepoint comprises 7 building blocks: collaboration (sharing, diaries), personal site on the portal, search, content management, business forms and processes, decision-making.
To conclude, Microsoft’s overall message:
– the world is changing
– new private/work mix
– how to manage information (blog, IM, portal, we can’t manage 80 emails a day so we need a suitable way of disseminating information).
What I got out of it
Aside from the fact that the presentation was a little too marketing-oriented, showing the problems only in the light of the in-house offer (but hey, we’re an adult audience and we can tell the difference), here are my thoughts on the subject.
First of all, Microsoft is completely embracing the collaborative and community approach (or at least it’s giving the impression that it’s doing so very well). In any case, the fact that this player is confirming that the future is no longer the workstation and the document on the individual hard disk, but a real globalisation of resources and content on the intranet (which goes well beyond the traditional client/server approach), while it may seem to be a case of following the lead for the initiated, is nonetheless a strong signal to the entire market. For those who wondered whether the practices of the net would remain blocked at the door of companies, we have the answer. In any case, the speech is consistent with what many people are defending today.
While sharing information and working on (and monitoring) shared documents are real issues that seem to me to be well addressed by this offering, I find it hard to see it as a real collaborative solution, but perhaps that’s just a question of terminology.
In my opinion, what’s missing is a real exchange capability. So of course, between email, IM and the possibility of creating your own site/wiki/blog on the intranet, there’s no shortage of possibilities. The fact remains that the first two modes are channels for private conversation, the content of which cannot be capitalised on by the company, and that the third option has been presented more as a space for publication than a space for exchange. But publication only makes sense when the information can be used to contribute to a discussion… or at least that’s what gives it real added value.
In my view, the offering presented here is geared more towards sharing than collaboration… and that’s already a very good thing. The extensive integration of the components of the Office suite into this approach is more reminiscent of office automation 2.0 than collaborative working. It’s more like a shared evolution of office automation than a real collaborative dynamic. Very ready and not quite people enough, in fact. But perhaps that’s not the objective of a solution that, according to the publisher, is likely to affect everyone from very small businesses to large corporations, and therefore take account of very diverse expectations and contexts. In fact, in my opinion, for a company, this approach is the first necessary step towards something deeper that goes beyond the offer that was presented to me.
If I were to go too far, I’d say it’s the difference between sharing what you do and doing it together. But here you have to take into account the prism through which each of us sees each concept.
One last word to mention a premise that I don’t agree with today. The main question asked by the audience after the presentation concerned support and the difficulty of bringing these new practices into the company (sharing, publishing, no longer keeping control of one’s own production). The answer was ‘don’t worry, it’ll happen on its own because people have already got to grips with blogs, wikis, IM etc… and if worse comes to worst we have partners who can help you’.
I don’t agree with that. The generation that has integrated these practices is only arriving in companies in dribs and drabs, and generally in positions where their practices will be subordinate to the goodwill of their management. And the vast majority of managers have not yet been impacted by these tools in their lives outside work. Relying solely on those who are going to arrive in the company gradually (and then more massively) can be dangerous, because what they bring with them can be stifled if management is not involved in changing practices. When they are more numerous and reach managerial positions, the change may then be too brutal. Without losing sight of the possibility of the project failing in the meantime because it will not have borne fruit quickly enough. This kind of change in habits and attitudes needs to be accompanied. If there is one change in the software offering that needs to be accompanied by support in its human dimension, it is precisely this, insofar as it has as much influence on behaviour as the strict skills associated with using the software.
In any case, this seems to me to be going in the right direction and confirming that tomorrow’s intranet will be people-centric.
