Smaller Simpler Collaboration Solutions

Bleeding Edge highlights a view of collaboration that I have a lot of sympathy with – the simple one. They then go on to highlight a new service based on email; I’ve not tried it so I’m not going comment on the particular approach.

I have a lot of sympathy for the simple collaboration approach but I don’t actually subscribe to the black-and-white one in Bleeding Edge:

What we eventually learned about groupware and collaborative software, after the expenditure of more than $US1 billion dollars, was that it led to a dramatic blow-out in IT budgets, for little increase in collaborative productivity. The only tool that did boost collaborative output, it emerged, was the one we’d all started out with at the beginning of the networked society: e-mail.

I agree that email has by far outstripped every other collaboration technique, but I don’t see it as the ‘only tool’ that has boosted collaboration output. Where my perspective is different though is within teams within organisations where they have managed to build a common sense that has made the team significantly more productive than it would have been without it. The main impact wasn’t the technology, it was the ‘common sense’ (the working process). These teams moved t the point where they lived in a collaboration space and practically never used email, email actually became an annoying interruption.

Email makes sense to people because it’s ‘common sense’ is obvious, other collaboration techniques suffer because they expect people to learn a new ‘common sense’. Other technologies may have a simpler common sense and lead to a step change in collaboration but I don’t see that happening any time soon. In the present teams will become more productive if they use technologies and build a ‘common sense’ but that takes time and effort.