Random thoughts on Collaboration

Collaboration is the central topic of various social software in enterprise space. There are a wide ranges of features from these vendors built on the core of twitting, such as

1. broadcast "twitter" messaging
2. calender
3. project/to-do list
4. file sharing, attachment.

The underpinning theme of these features is how to better facilitate communication from one person to another. It may be categorized as people-people collaboration.

Although this pyramid switch from email/outlook centric collaboration to a more community centric collaboration is the major advance of today's collaboration movement in enterprise, I couldn't help to notice it is missing a major part in our daily work space - system.

We interact with enterprise software/system everyday, perhaps far more so than with our colleagues.

How do enterprise software interact with its users today? One example: users enter some data in to the system. System then goes out to do bunch of works to process it, generating various data along the way. Users will then use some other programs to retrieve data from system to proceed as part of their daily tasks. Looking from 3000 feet, this is indeed a collaboration between people and system, however, on a complete different platform of communication. Chances are that each enterprise system will have it own way of communication channel and its own way of interaction design with its users.

In my opinion, collaboration between people and system need to go further than just making system sending an alert messaging embedded inside someone's news feed. There need to be new generation of enterprise software approach that focuses on how to effectively interact with its user in a unified way.

We have already started seeing benefits of the new generation of collaboration software based on advent of new social media. It would be a more promising future if we can continue on improving people's ability to collaboration with system in our work place.