Electronic togetherness

Once an enterprise, organisation or committee grows to the second member the questions about working together arise. How to do so effectively might well be the first. It is easy when you share an office or workspace—you can talk or shout as the thought, bright idea, new information or correction comes to mind. When the object of your communication is absent, a scribbled note will pass the information or prompt discussion. If the matter is a bit urgent a phone call or text will do usually do just fine.

That kind of working together and cooperating is all easy and essentially intuitive, no training or special tools required. Multiply that by hundreds or thousands of colleagues, work places and spaces and it is no longer either easy or intuitive. So you certainly need tools and systems. Training may depend on the organisation as much as the tools or nature of the activity itself.

So far, so good. But today’s world has brought virtual teams, global working, time zones and other wonderful but challenging complexities. Some have been with us for years, like international cooperation and time zones not to mention differences in language and business culture. That culture itself has been transformed by the Web.

 

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Crystal clear

But one thing is crystal clear: communications. They are today are better, smarter and more ubiquitous than ever. Unified Communications (UC) is an ever-improving set of always-on tools for people to work together as individuals or teams, especially that deceptively simple but powerful ‘Presence’ feature. It is as easy to see someone’s availability as it ever was with a glance around the office. There are multiple other tools in UC, with one key feature that differentiates them from previous generations of simple communications by voice, video or words/text—ad hoc user settings. You can set up business rules for almost all eventualities, such as ‘follow me’ routing through all channels for specific callers, for example. Team members or chosen colleagues can prioritise communications from each other or direct them to specific channels. Because UC is natively digital and software-defined, almost any specific rule can be implemented. Equally important for many security purposes, all traffic can be appropriately and securely logged.

Those many smart and valuable features of UC really shine in collaboration. It is worth capitalising because it really has become distinct from simple working together and in cooperation. Collaboration involves people working towards shared objectives in a joint enterprise over a period of time. It is different from and deeper than simple cooperation. The participants could be and often are from a range of different organisations and with diverse expertise forming a team. This is essentially much deeper than simply being nominal colleagues with a joint employer or even business partners in an ongoing relationship. Their roles and responsibilities are characterised by the joint enterprise or project rather than just by their employers and jobs. Importantly, so is their data and communications.

In many respects the top of the tree currently in collaboration is project work, perhaps especially or at least most visibly in major construction, architectural and engineering projects. For one thing they are multi-disciplinary by nature, with professionals of different disciplines collaborating under a project leading firm for a joint client. There will be contractors, sub-contractors and suppliers also, forming a complex hierarchy of authority and control, management and decision making and, often most crucially, critical timeline paths. The management and communication tools for such projects have been developing for many years — Microsoft Project was launched in 1984 and later became just its third application for Windows. IBM’s Lotus Notes is another example of collaboration software from the same period, often credited as the original of the ‘groupware’ class of software applications.