I’ll be there for you

A recent challenging experience with a collaborative workshop has inspired me to think in new ways about the impact that social business collaboration (SBC) technologies can have on productivity and the quality of work.

It was not that long ago that an effort by a small team to collaborate on a task from a distance was difficult and marginally productive.  For example, attempts to use email to collaborate on an analysis of an urgent business problem suffered from a lack of timeliness and were limited in the ability to scale the number of participants effectively. Teleconferencing could be used to overcome the timeliness and scale problems but introduced new constraints on the ability to share all but the simplest content. In addition, these styles of collaboration were fairly impersonal and devoid of non-verbal communication.

The traditional definition of proximity is nearness in space, time, or relationship. In the pre-digital age this definition was probably sufficient. With the advent of SBC technologies I believe that a broader perspective of the concept of proximity, one that includes virtual nearness and sensory inputs, such as visual and audio content, is appropriate.

As a result of the introduction of low cost, high quality personal video conferencing and synchronous document editing tools, a geographically dispersed team of experts can be assembled on-demand that can share rich content and collaborate in real-time. And because the participants can see and hear each other, their interaction is far more personal. Important non-verbal communication is not lost.

The ability of an enterprise to effectively utilize social business tools is dependent upon new ways of thinking about business problems, such as finding cost effective ways to overcome the tyranny of distance. Those that cling to traditional ways of doing business will become increasingly irrelevant and unable to complete.

In addition to traditional tools, I have added some of the more recent SBC tools to the list below. They are presented in descending order of notional proximity. 

• Video conferencing
• Web meetings
• Video casting
• Teleconferencing
• Email messaging
• Blogging and micro-blogging
• Wiki documents
• Discussion forums
• Instant messaging
• Photo sharing
• Audio (pod) casting
• Text messaging

I am interested to know if your organization is investing in SBC technologies, enabling and encouraging your use of any of these tools to solve business problems, reduce costs, improve productivity or improve service delivery. 

Please share your thoughts and experiences.