Andrew Brooks

Why is working together still like pulling teeth?

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Once upon a time Dr. Eddie Obeng suggested corporations should provide employees with an IP address. He saw a world where we would all have a website about us, our roles, responsibilities, projects, etc…

Several years ago now I remember being on holiday in New Zealand and meeting someone with a two week deadline to complete an online competency assessment for the entire sales force at Vodafone Japan! Without breaking in to a sweat, I made a couple of phone calls, set up a workspace in Groove invited a virtual team in to the workspace (the Business Analysts were based in the UK, the Project Manager, Developers and Graphics people were based in the US, the Client was back in Japan, and I was in New Zealand). The experience of working with a small team of professionals in this way was liberating compared to the corporate world.

Unfortunately Groove requires a local installation and getting client IT and Security police to approve installation (even if I covered the cost of the licence keys) was impossible! I then took out a hosted Sharepoint service with Easily. This enabled me to build simple, branded and secure virtual workspaces for virtual teams to collaborate with each other.

At a major mobile telco based in Hatfield I decided to try setting up an internal blog to keep my team and stakeholders informed of what I was up to. However, because most large IT groups suffer from the same issues, I could not follow a formal/R&D route (cos I’d never get approval). I had to set the blog up ‘under the cover of darkness’. Thinking back, even my boss was against the idea and suggested I had more important priorities.

Those of you that know me would recognise that this is the sort of challenge I like!

Following the blog came the wiki. Again, this had to be set up ‘under the cover of darkness’, and only emerged once we believed a ‘critical mass’ had been achieved. Once the boss saw the power (a major step forward in reuse, communication, collaboration, and silo busting), there was no holding us back.

Guy Dickinson (he and I go back a long way now) is an amazing internet/learning guru capable of delivering the work of ten men, was the brains who set everything up. He walked the floor and made sure all the early adopters were given a ‘leg up’. Other innovative uses of free technologies included RSS feeds, and podcast reporting and learning!

Some 18 months on from when Guy and I started our ‘under the cover of darkness’ blog experiments within the BI group, the main IS group has recently acknowledged it can no longer ignore the power, simplicity, the rise of unofficial wikis/blogs (and a now strong internal customer demand). I am pleased to report that Guy is now supporting the roll out of wikis across IS.

Why is this sort of change so hard? With all the developments and money spent on tools such as knowledge management, collaboration, document management, workflow, project management, et al, very few organisations have advanced their collaboration and organisational memory capabilities much further than that of using email!

Email is an excellent notification system, and a very poor collaboration, knowledge sharing, virtual team working system, so why is it taking us so very long to evolve?

It’s not through the lack of trying though! Just look at the graveyard of very expensive programmes you have run over the years, document management, knowledge management, workflow management, learning management, etc. most failed to deliver the promised benefits, and many are simply no longer being used. Yet most business processes still depend on email to work!

Maybe it’s a people/cultural thing?

The good news is that Guy has been developing an online collaborative outlining tool 'Thinkfold' - easier to use than to explain. I hope it does not take the average IS organisation 18 months or more to see the value!