Our team struggles with more basic communication. And yet when Sharepoint became available in our organization, our team jumped at getting on board. The group think was that this would solve a lot of problems by giving us a tool which was communication based.

Reality was that the same bad habits were then applied to the new tool just like the old tools. And soon the new tool was just as cumbersome and ineffecient as the old ones.

Here is a small list of some of the bad habits or misconceptions that beleaguer our leadership:

• Email is a good document repository
• An Inbox with 4000 messages is good for one’s productivity
• You can never have enough sub-folders
• Spend all your time reacting. Then you don’t have to waste time planning…

I wish I could say that these habits have been resolved and that all of our tools are benefitting our team because we have worked on producing good habits. But that is not case. I try myself to lead by example and to work with people one on one when I see some of these poor habits. I find that most times people are more than happy to take advice in this area - they usually soak it up. And with great resources out there like David’s book (GTD) and sites like this, I find that a small bit of my time is enough to get people started. Then I just point them in the right direction.

Sharepoint is indeed the cure for something (much like the mould in the sink) but not for communication. I am a project manager by trade and have spent a professional lifetime finding my way around the latest techno-nonsense that will finally, finally give us a grip on our project status and spending.

The latest one is a beast called “Clarity” which is so complex to administer that we have actually had to take on extra staff so that the projects required to use it to do not founder under the weight of its inputs. I am not joking or exaggerating, you cannot even get a printed report out of the thing.

In contrast I have seen project work most effectively administered by a tiny Lotus app that wanted you to upload a standard wordprocessed report (ie the same one you would submit on paper anyway) and give a traffic light (Red Amber Green) to your status. If you wanted the project to get managment attention you put in a Red or Amber and they automatically put you on the agenda of the next management meeting.

I have struggled to use complex support applications from Tivoli to Applix to whadever. I did get effective support from an ancient mainframe mail system that the gurus from engineering monitored faithfully.

The best tools are the simple ones supported by good behaviours. The worst ones are the complex ones whose asymmetric demands compared to value delivered create avoidance and even downright fraud.

When we started our two-person graphic and web business, we bought into using several web-based systems for handling client communications and managing projects. We were told everyone was doing it these days: electronic CRM and job trackers were essential, said our local business support group.

After just a couple of months when we’d climbed the initial learning curve, we quickly tired of the added overhead in costs and time that the supposedly wonderful new tools had introduced. I now think that dropping the systems everyone else had told us were essential was the best business decision we’ve made this year. We’re so much more productive on paper, and we’ve got to know our clients as more than numbers in a list.

We’re now using a whiteboard for our project management, and simple paper-based calendars for client liaison and records. I think a lot of SMEs could benefit from this philosophy — by avoiding the pressure to use systems that were designed for larger companies, they might prevent the usual headaches and admin that such software and tools introduce into their working weeks.

I work with a design organization spread across three continents. We use email (doesn’t work that well), PowerPoint and Flash to communicate design concepts (like taking a whole day to say “hello”), Lotus Notes applications (good for recording forever, bad for anything in the same decade you’re inhabiting), and various custom software tools that are always more trouble than they’re worth. We’ve had success with two things: the Boeing 777 (very effective, but very time consuming and expensive in several senses) and just recently a high-definition videoconferencing system that consumes a frightening amount of bandwidth, but really works. In fact, it’s astonishing how well it works. Unfortunately it’s also astonishing how much it costs.

What works great for us is goto meeting. I work in a government organization, and am working on a project that consists of different government portions plus industry. We use gotomeeting for documentation reviews and project status meetings. This is really useful in allowing four to six different locations to interact without the need for travel. In that respect, it saves a lot of time and money. But its ease of use can also be a drawback, which results in more meetings than are really necessary. So, you take the good with the bad. In the end, I would rather sit at my desk through twice as many meetings than traveling each week.

In our organization, we were using a custom project/task tracking tool, which was required for all employees to use. The end product was to generate metrics across the organization for upper management use. This became a big issue, because the product was not very reliable or useable, the data fields required were too cumbersome to make it useful for everyday use. So you ended up updating status twice, once to your own system and once to the organizations system. To compound matters, there was a lot of pressure from management to ensure it was update weekly, and that nothing was overdue. Suffice it to say, the whole goal from the workers perspective was to just meet the requirements and leave the tasks as general as possible, which I imagine didn’t generate meaningful metrics either. I think management finally caught on and decided to scrap the system. Good thing for now, except the reason the old system was scrapped was so that the managers and project managers could take extensive MS Project training for the next version of metric generating system. We may be wishing for the old system in the end.

Running a large news organization in the midst of a rapidly changing media, finance and tech ecology in the late 1990s, it struck me that the only way for the journalists to remain relevant was to speed up their ability to collaborate to absolute real-time, and across disciplines. The culture has caught up with us, and I see Twitter being used in just such a way as I applied mIRC, but in an open source way. More about that in this link here.

http://knackeredhack.com/2007/12/19/66-characters-in-search-of-a-story/

My main advice for managers would be to understand in detail the nature of the problem to be resolved, and to observe with great care the individual interactions. Collaboration needs a light touch from the manager to allow a particular type of personality to emerge that can hold a team together. That person won't necessarily be someone normally found in a supervisory function and may be as important as the functionality of the tools chosen.

A homely example: I still have a fax number on my business card. Although I sometimes send a fax (very rare), I never receive one. I still have a street address on my business card. I still get FedEx envelopes with manually signed letters, I rarely send one. I still have an email address on my business card. Although I get relatively little spam, I read 10% of what I get and answer maybe half of that. I still have an office phone on my business card. No more than 10% of calls I make or receive are live—it’s done through voice mail. For almost every meeting there’s a call-in number even if every one is actually in the office within a three-minute walk/elevator ride. If there’s an all-hands meeting in a department, no one will ask a question, but will have whispered conversations afterwards about what wasn’t said.

The worst communication tool I ever used at work was the Blackberry. Don’t get me wrong, it has its place. But as a tool to exchange ideas anything more complex than where to meet for lunch it is too bandwidth starved. Trying to make decisions based on people thumb typing ideas based on descriptions of attached powerpoint decks summarizing three levels of committee meetings based on other powerpoints … . Well, you get the idea.

In large organizational settings, however, it is the near immortality of communication channels and their overlapping and underlapping purposes and intended audiences that gets me. If the man with two watches can never be sure what time it is, the big business with legacy channels can never be sure what planet it’s on. The process energy hump to get any channel set up guarantees that it will be kept “just in case” even though content becomes stale. A bot could roam these systems taking down the zombie channels and although no one would notice, no one would ever want to say, “no, we don’t need it anymore.”

Then there are the Harold Pinter plays based on Kafka reinterpreted as Dilbert dates Alice in Wonderland that you fall into with the “Enterprise Knowledge Management Enablement Empire” to guarantee that only ASCII characters guaranteed not to crash the mainframe screen scraper systems and other high-risk issues are locked down through controls on the creation, versioning, branding, stylesheets and access privileges for corporate systems to assure a uniform standard, based on the lowest possible denominator. As Admiral Hooper said “ships are safe in harbor, but that’s not what ships are for.”

One consequence of lockdown is that the Google powered intranet search engine is useless. Think about it. If users can link only with approval, most pages end up linking within only a very narrow domain.

The best communications tool I ever used at work was the 15-minutes reserved each day for my boss and our two assistants to have a stand-up meeting to huddle. Some days it ran over, many days it was a quick 1-minute “nothing to bring up..

I introduced Basecamp to our website update project group. Success was limited due to no participation from our IT department (marketing & management were on board and active).

IT had built their own project management system that was bloated, confusing and overly complicated. IT admitted to its poor usability and in looking at other projects within the system (how I even wound up in another project was yet another problem with their system), it was not being used much by their own department because of its failings.

A system is only as good as the participants who are willing to use it. The basic communication component was certainly evident and baffles me to this day how that IT group manages to get things done. Thinking back on it now, they were big IM users. A Twitter-like interface with OmniFocus-like shortcuts for categorizing would have been ideal.

I will keep this short and to the point.

We attempted to integrate a wiki as our centralized point of information. We set up an rss feed so people could then notified of what info had been changed. We were hoping this could eliminate the “to all” emails.

It didn’t work. The employees found the wiki confusing. I think that is in part because wikis are so flexible and sometimes overwhelming to people.

What did work for us was Facebook, and here is why. We hire over 600+ college students to work for us in the summer and we have to train them before the hit the ground in June. We figured that about every college student had a Facebook account and that was easier then forcing them in to some sort of corporate training forum. We set up Facebook groups by positions and asked the employees to join the group. So far it has been a huge hit and has cut my e-mail from summer staff by 2/3.

Having worked in the IT department for the same company for 15 years as we have grown from 100 people to 65,000, I have seen and participated in many attempts to improve communication and workflow across the company. In the end there have been many failures due to lack of interest, poor management and overall lack of understanding of the value. However, the biggest problem is the unclear expectations and the belief that a new tool will cure all ills.

The reality is that technology in and of itself will never fix communication issues. If the process for communication is flawed then the technology will only exacerbate the flaws and make the communication problems more profound. In other words, if the process sucks, technology solutions will only make it suck faster.

Without agreement on the problem being solved, tools such as SharePoint, are useless and just lead to further confusion about how things work and where documents are stored. Also, many times, people try to make new solutions work like the old solutions being replaced - another major issue. As an example, many years ago we were upgrading a scheduling package from a second tier inexpensive solution to one of the members of Gartner’s ‘magic quadrant’. As we worked on the project, various members of the team pushed very hard to replicate customizations that we had developed due to shortcomings in the current product. It took a significant effort to get them to step back and realize that the new, and vastly superior, product had much better ways of achieving the same ends for which they had developed kludgy solutions. While this is not a n example directly of communications issues, it is an example of how difficult it is to change culture.

In more recent times, I have tried to use SharePoint as a repository for documents generated and referenced by my teams. Again, changing culture and process are much more important than the change of the tool.

David Allen writes (and says) that if you don’t trust your system, you won’t use it. The same goes for corporate and team communication solutions. If the entire team does not work together to identify their needs, create the solution and, most importantly, buy into the philosophy and approach, the solution will fail. Some people try to adopt and others work as hard as possible to sabotage them.

I've had a mess of such experiences. The one that comes closest to mind is the creation of a web-based calendar for our institution. I teach at a medical college with ~500 students. Our faculty is largely adjunct, and even full-time faculty are distributed geographically & temporally between clinic and classroom locations, and have difficulty coming together for face-to-face meetings. We joke about Mercury being in permanent retrograde in our school's birthchart - communication is a constantly broken issue. One difficulty we've faced, is the lack of a central institutional calendar, easily accessible to all, capable of catching scheduling conflicts, and available from remote locations. As the resident edugeek, I was charged with creating a web-based calendar, and muckled together an installation of WebCalendar - technically a great application. We placed portals on the school's website and learning management system, handed administration to the school's receptionist, and ... basically no one used it. Changes in meeting times/dates were often not updated, many items were never placed on it, serious conflicts between overlapping events continued to occur. Even after 3 years, folks still express surprise on being told/reminded that this even exists. We still largely rely on a collection of individual calendars residing in various offices, often in significant conflict with one another.

In contrast, another tool - phpSurveyor (now LimeSurvey) - introduced at about the same time - has been received very successfully. I set up an installation of this to be used for voting on faculty senate issues. Our official quorum was previously 10%, as out of 90+ full-time and adjunct faculty, we were fortunate when we could manage to get 10 in a room together at one time for a face-to-face meeting. With online voting, we were able to easily boost participation to 35-50% of faculty.

I think the difference, is that this latter has a focus around specific prescribed tasks. It involves not merely the introduction of a tool, but introduces a focus for activity, a specific invitation for participation. The calendar has been more of a "build it & they will come" project - perhaps not a realistic expectation. Complaints about our prevailing system are common, but we don't seem to be able to come together with a collective vision to drive a solution.

Kindof like a hammer. A great tool, but houses don't seem to get built when you merely lay them around the place.

Will Taylor
http://wt.similibus.org

Most of the previous comments tell a similar story: people resist to new technologies. Unfortunately, and slthough in a smaller (i. e., non-corporate) scale, my experience is the same: whenever a team needs some collaboration tool, instead of clogging e-mail boxes, I’m an evangelist for tools like GoogleDocs or Zoho. I’ve given up on telling people about wikis, but when they show an inner refusal of something that is just like the MSWord or MSExcel (minus featuritis) they keep using, it’s hard to understand. Maybe, as others have acknowledged, it’s really a communication (and team cohesion) problem; I like to think it will take some 5 years for these tools to be widely used — as it took for e-mail to become so ubiquitous —, but I’m losing my faith.

Merlin, just saw you at SXSW. This is actually my first comment on 43.

Mine is simple. Gmail. I manage 5-10 designers around the country and it is tough to keep track of new projects, current projects and follow-ups. We tried many web based apps - basecamp, project, ect. But we are moving so fast, we just use GMAIL now.

I have created a defined labeling system with filters in GMail that helps me keep track of everything that is going on. Using the colors and some third party plug-ins I can quickly get to a task when a client calls. Clients always want to add new requests in a new email, but we make sure to always respond in the original email conversation. Sometimes this can lead to a few hundred emails in conversation.

Also, we send all our PSDs with Gmail. I just purchased 45 Gigs of space. I never have to delete an email again. Custom labels are as also created for each client, for each designer / developer and for type of file (ie. zip or psd). This also helps with books keeping and accounting.

This works on many levels, because a lot of other companies rely on us as their design team. So they give me an email address with their company name and I use that to talk to the client. So in gmail, for that client I respond with the company’s email address and my real email is hidden. It’s very powerful. Save me a ton of time every day.

Hope that made sense.

I work in education and recently switched from one system to another. What I found in my new environment is an organization that throws technology at problems. To complicate the issue there no central solution. So instructors are on one system (First Class), administrators are on another (MS Exchange). I’m work in IT thus I’m in both worlds. Additionally we have people who use SharePoint, AngelWeb, Blackboard and a myriad of adopted and home-brewed solutions. The end result is that it is impossible to know where to find information and getting information out to people in the organization is impossible. We are the classic example of why adding another “solution” isn’t necessarily a good thing.

At my university (Leiden, Netherlands) they introduced the Blackboard Academic Suite a couple of years ago.

It’s an online toolset for students and teachers to work together and streamline processes for both.

The teachers can provide students with class information, reading lists, deadline info, give them assignents and return feedback.

Students can hand in their assignments, work together online on assignments, discuss in the boards and find their grades.

Sounds great, but I’ve been here for years and I haven’t yet met any student who actually used it. Here’s why.

The professors and students just don’t want to use it. Their response to this new tool is just to simply ignore it. So they don’t use it.

Then, who needs an elaborate online contraption to hand in an assignment? Sinds when did e-mail stop working? So yes, assignments still go through e-mail. It’s just easier. Much easier.

Online discussion? Really? We see each other every day. Assignments are for groups of 2, 3 students, 4 tops. So how do we handle it? Go home, get online, log in, head for the boards and upload our latest thoughts? We have great cafeteria, so we go for lunch. Together. And eat and talk.

The general info for each class is handed out at the beginning of the semester by the professors. I can go on and on about the non-existing problems this Blackboard is trying to fix.

There is simply no need to ever log onto Blackboard and it’s just something you check every couple of weeks when you remember to.

Concluding, this Blackboard Suite is a tool for communicating in a university environment that is still in search of a problem to solve.

As far as I can see a useless waste of time and money, they are throwing new tools at no communication problem.

I, too, teach at a university and have experienced the same Blackboard woes. In fact, I’ve taught at two universities where IT folks and administrators have strongly encouraged (if not mandated) the use of Blackboard in all classes. Technology for its own sake seems to be the attitude that possesses many administrators—-they don’t want the university to fall behind in the “online courses” craze.

While good in theory, Blackboard ends up creating extra, often needless, work for instructors. Some students never check the course website on Blackboard, no matter how often you insist that they do, while other students expect every frickin’ thing you say or hand out in class to be on Blackboard. So the faculty end up doing double the administrative work for no compelling reason. Everything that is photocopied and handed out in class has to be uploaded and organized on Blackboard (which, by the way, has an extremely slow and cumbersome interface).

There are other issues as well. Many students expect faculty to post their grade on Blackboard; but the registrar’s electronic grade submission page does not communicate with Blackboard, so faculty must enter their grades two separate times using two separate interfaces.

University communication is chaotic, to say the least. Ten years or so ago, email became a standard means of communication between faculty and students. Today, however, many students never check their university email accounts, preferring instant messaging, Facebook, and gmail/hotmail/etc. To solve these problems, the university just set up a comprehensive communication client (email, calendar, messaging) that no-one uses, except for simple email access. Meanwhile, universities keep shoveling over money to Microsoft, Novell, etc. for new services that only add redundancy to the system.

As far as I’m concerned, university IT departments try to provide too many comprehensive communication “solutions.” Schools would do well to provide each member of the university a bare network account and an optional webmail client. If faculty want to require their students to communicate online, then they can set up their own course website, blog, or wiki.

Oh, for the days of face-to-face interaction and paper-based communication! One system. You either participated or you did not.

Looking at many of the comments here, including my own I am inclined to reject the idea that people resist technology. I have seen all kinds of groups rapidly adopt something they liked and even hijack functionality to do something they wanted but which was not intended.

I major failing in many tech introductions of groupworking tools is that they violate the datamart contract: I must get at least as much value out of it as the effort of input demanded of me. Systems that suck data out of you but do not assist will be avoided by everyone. Systems that deliver but require much effort to keep current will go rapidly stale and die.

Low thresholds to participation, low complexity, clear benefits… it is just common sense.

I’m currently in an Architectural Grad School program that has abandoned Blackboard in favor of Angel, but also, nobody I know feels that it’s an improvement. The problem with those systems is that they seem like they’d be useful if the entire academic logistical experience was funneled through it, but since it only has a partial adoption rate it has been pretty unsuccessful. Most of the time that it gets talked about is when students confess confusion over where articles are stored, in which arbitrary folder online, etc.

The studio that I’m in has actually tried to use some sort of homemade-dotMac-iWeb forum thing that is just as unsuccessful as it sounds. I’ve been in touch with the faculty member who manages it, trying to urge him to consider Basecamp by 37 Signals as a far better tool for the Studio scale of one teacher to about ten students.

I actually evaluated and implemented Basecamp for my previous job at a Design/Build firm that involved remote collaboration across several different home offices. I haven’t checked in with them in about six months, but when I left them they were about six months into successfully using it.

Probably the most helpful thing in implementing that (aside from 37 Signals keeping everything as simple as possible, kudos to them for that) was to first give people access to a prepared example I modeled after one of the ongoing projects, letting everyone play with it remotely and get their feet wet, looking for questions. Next we met together, with everyone on a workstation with mine on a video projector. I toured people through the landscape, trying to answer questions as they occurred, doing some trial and error experiments as we figured out what we could and couldn’t do together. Also, we found that Basecamp’s notifications work very well to pull people into the suite environment and out of the email one, furthering its adoption rate right from the start.

I’m hoping to get my school’s studio program onto Basecamp, as the suite really does keep a narrow focus on the what its capabilities are. Also, a key to fast adoption will be either having some sort of live demo/tour at the start of the semester, or to set up a screencast for new users to watch so that people have a stronger introduction to it prior to use.

From my experience a coffee machine is the only item of technology capable of improving communication. I distrust all communication where it is not clear there is some human being on the other end. Talk about something over a cup of coffee and you see your partner in productive communication with your own eyes.

Hi! Long time listener, first time caller. I started a pet sitting business (yes, you read correctly) two years ago, and I heart technology. So over the course of the past few years, these are some of the things I've attempted.

Email - Duh. I use GoDaddy to host my site, so I used their email. Light dawned on marblehead when I finally made the switch to Google FYD. Now everyone has Gmail, with my logo on the top right. It also takes two seconds to give an @Gopherdogs.com email addy to a new sitter. (Thanks for Inbox Zero btw. It's saved my ass a bunch) Huzzah!

Forums - I set up a forum for our sitters. I had everyone log in and make a post. That was a year ago. I think there are five posts in total. Epic Fail.

BaseCamp - I really like(d) Basecamp. It was great for projects, and an easy FTP for designers and people who needed our designs. I rallied the troops and told them that this was it. That everything goes through here. It worked great until we ran out of organized projects. I need better org. skills to make good use out of it. Semi-Fail (my bad, not the tech)

Wiki - I get the importance of these. I have one. I really want to launch it. It's been waiting for me (about 6 months now) to use it. I have aspirations to put our manual up, and have it be a living, breathing thing. I think this could be Huzzah!, it just needs some loving.

Twitter - This could be very cool. I am in the last stages of getting all my Gopher Girls (my sitters) of getting an account. I pay them an extra $10/per month for unlimited text messages so I won't feel guilty getting them to Tweet. It's more for fun than anything else. I think this will bring everyone closer together and maybe avoid a traffic jam or two. Grade is a probable Huzzah!

My conclusion? Nothing beats the triple threat of IM/TXT, Email and Phone. Ok, so it's like 4. IM/TXT for the "Hey, how's it going"...but keep it short or a quick question. Email for the punch list or forward important info. And finally the phone, because it's great to hear a HUMAN every once in a while. The phone is great for longer problems as well.

It's not about the tech, it's how you use it, and can you sell everyone else on using it.

Also IChat/Skype to check in and "meet" with my operation in Boston.

That's my $.02.

P.S. Merlin, your Worst Website Ever panel at SXSW was my fav.

I work for a Federal Government Agency and our public affairs office is split between Washington, D.C., Denver, and Louisiana. We work on a bunch of different projects and I thought we needed to use something to coordinate what we are doing because our infrastructure is horrid and our IT Department restricts everything that we try to do.

I was able to convince our boss to try out Basecamp and a couple of us used it, but I was soon fighting an uphill battle. We have some older people whose idea of technology is Groupwise email (which should just go away), Internet Explorer, faxes, and a shared network drive. They have not heard of Web 2.0, Twitter, Facebook, or other web services.

The problem is that the shared network drives are limited by office. Washington has their own, Denver has their own, and Louisiana is by them self.

Basecamp failed miserably because no one would use it and everyone thought it was a waste of time. I would have to agree with Durango who earlier posted that it is only as good as people who will use it.

We have been promised Sharepoint, but that promise has been told to us for several years and not delivered. Our organization has been spending 10’s of thousands of dollars on dedicated web conferencing, four in our Denver Office and three in our DC office. These offices are not that big.

When we tried to get a couple of staff tied in with web cams at their desk, IT said no because of band width concerns, but these big systems persist and they aren’t being used.

It is just frustrating when people I work with are just going through their jobs, don’t want to do anything to bring our agency into the future and I am stuck using Groupwise that is several versions behind and paper.

I work for a company that develops a software product which is sold for Windows, *NIX and Mac. Therefore, we have developers, QE folks and managers who use all platforms. Wiki allows anyone to edit the document from anywhere, and we use it for specs, design discussion, project planning and other tasks. Even more importantly, all of our Wikis are searchable, easily edited and all edits are tracked. It allows pretty much anyone with a browser to participate. Wiki definitely has some significant minuses, but for us it works.

Somehow we are getting Sharepoint pushed on us, which is frighteningly expensive, hard to use and full of bugs. No one I’ve talked to on the pilot teams has had a positive experience with it, yet management has been sold on it. Only Windows users are able to fully participate, and it’s going to silo information like nothing else. I predict a failure unless management makes people use it.

I run a company that runs a network of online observatories, so we have a staff across different timezones, with different skill sets and tech set-ups. We tried basecamp, but some said it was too simple and didn’t use it. I attended the “Managing Distributed Staffs” core conversation at SXSW and got a new idea to use a password protected blog. I think we also need a group chat area. Right now, we’re mainly using endless email round robins and IM. We need better email practices in general to share info and collaborate. This practice of replying to all, and counting that as a direct communication of vital info is particularly frustrating.

I can echo a lot of what’s already been said here: if the technology enhances a process that’s working, the technology will get used. If it doesn’t, it just adds overhead, sometimes at an absurd level. To me, this is a simple customer service issue: is the technology developed by engineers for engineers because they think it’s a cool thing/will revolutionize the world, or is it developed to solve a problem people actually have/facilitate a process already in place? Above all, a technology must take into account the people who use it.

I’ll add a couple of things I haven’t seen here: The task of organizing workgroups starts with elimination: tasks, decisions, all kinds of clutter need to go. What’s left is easier to organize. I notice that many technology solutions encourage clutter and propagate the myth that organizing clutter will lead to effectiveness.

And, I think work clutter starts with decision clutter: If I’ve got 20 priorities, I’ve got no priority, so I keep everything. How will I clear the clutter when it all seems so necessary?

I ran a 5-year experiment once: I threw out all the memos and documents I got at work; my cubemate saved every one in well-organized (to him) stacks on his desk. In 5 years, I had to ask him to find a document I needed only 3 times. Now I throw things away with abandon. It helps me think.

I use basecamp, and I mostly like it for making available the most current task list and documents. It takes a little too much time to keep up though, and it needs one point person managing it and making sure it’s current. Even with that, I’ve had people forget about it and ask for the latest doc. Sigh. So, not sure it works much better than revision-dating documents and emailing them to groups. Either way you need someone responsible for making it work.

I’ve blogged about how clear decisions in meetings lead to more focused-clutter-free actions here http://collaborationzone.com/the-collaboration-hall-of-fame-nominations-are-now-open/2008/02/25/ so I’ll be brief: When we told our boss why we stopped talking every time she spoke (because we thought she was making a decision), she scribbled a large “D” on one plate and a large “O” on another, holding up the “O” plate when she was merely expressing an opinion, and the “D” plate when making a decision. This simple technology improved our meetings immensely: They got shorter and produced more fully informed decisions as well as better follow-through.

I think the root problem here is the belief that technology - low or high - enables us to circumvent the laws of nature (time, space, need for rest), and the laws of human nature (comfort, safety, belonging, the inherent messiness of collaboration).

I guess I'm going to buck the trend and actually state that we had a successful use of new technology to solve a communication problem.

Problem
I'm a member of a livestock organization that had a very politically charged issue arise last year regarding standardization of the breed. A draft document was created as the result of a series of conferences that the organization held over the period of a year. Once the draft was created, the organization at large was offered an additional opportunity to submit suggested changes via email, and snail mail. Please realize the membership generally has a low usage rate of computer communication (email can be a stretch).

An ad hoc committee was created to review the suggested changes BUT there was no money for the committee to travel from the far reaches of the US for the many face to face meetings that incorporating the memberships comments/suggestion required.

Solution

A Wiki was created to house the breed standards. All ad hoc committee members would join in regular conference calls and while on the call would review the document live on the wiki's website. A committee member served as editor and used the ability to color text to serve as a way of marking up the document. The "editor" did all of the writing and marking up and the others on the committee only had to be competent enough to refresh their browser page.

Being able to see the changes live discharged a lot of the finger point and claiming that changes were being made to the document without committee input and discussion. Further, because of the Wiki format, adding pictures to graphically show certain undesirable genetic traits, and thus making the text more understandable was easily done. In addition, when people were unclear what someone's suggest phrasing really was, the editor could easily type in the suggested change, the committee could review, and then discuss and wordsmith from the suggested change.

Also, when the combining of the materials was completed, the membership was allowed to see the wiki (but not comment) and could see how the comments were being incorporated into the document.

Hindsight

I argued strongly that we should add comments sections to the Wiki so that the membership could just post their comments rather than just email. In retrospect, I realize doing the email and snail mail helped to diffuse a possible flame war occurring.

I also had argued that we'd be better served by a webmeeting or netmeeting format would be superior. Unfortunately, either of these options required greater bandwidth for the committee members (some of whom were still on dial-up) and/or $ spent to secure the meeting time.

So while from my tech perspective the solution was a kluge, in the long run it was the right combination of a new technology (Wiki) and old (email), low bandwidth requirement, visual ease of seeing the changes, and the real-time ability to read the revised document.

It’s easy to trash the tool when it fails to fix the issue at hand; and perhaps as easy to criticize the intended user for resistance or ludditism in their failure to adopt use of the provided tool. However in my experiences where the tool “fails to fix the problem”, the issue most often seems to lie elsewhere; the “critical step” in the communications problem is about something other than the tool itself or with individuals’ willingness/openness to adopt its use. & the problem is that we threw a tool at a system that was broken elsewhere than in the need for a tool.

Many of the tools mentioned in the comments above are great tools, and perform well in their intended tasks. e.g. I had to bite my tongue in order not to jump in defending Learning Management platforms in blended classroom settings (I use Moodle in my institution, and am thrilled at what it has permitted us to do within our learning community). Similarly, a hammer is a great tool; but it does not build a house. And given any particular situation, dropping a hammer into the picture will not necessarily be what the system needs in order for a house to materialize. In such a situation - drop in hammer, no house results, or some ramshackle structure ultimates which subsequently leaks & falls apart - it is easy to frame the hammer as defective, or to characterize the user as resistant in its use. It’s perhaps a bit more difficult to perceive that perhaps the wood was of poor quality, or that in fact no house was desired to begin with.

I like to build tools. And to Bush-ism the old hack, “when all your tools are tools, all your problems look like things that tools can fix.” Ain’t always the case, is it?

In the example I gave above re the Calendar, I think there are 2 “obvious” but inaccurate conclusions: (1)the webcalendar application is not a good tool; and (2)the potential users are luddites and are unable/unwilling to adopt the technology. I really don’t think either of these conclusions are realistic. This tool is used quite effectively in other institutions/systems; and our users have enthusiastically adopted other technological tools which speak to their needs. I think the real issue here, is that the communications issue is broken elsewhere. No one was clambering for a tool to “fix” this - had they been, we would likely have seen several proposed “tool” solutions - a big paper calendar in the main hallway across from the faculty support office with copies faxed to other locations, &c. We’d have been working on refining the tool for communicating the calendar, and the web-based calendar would likely have been embraced as a successful solution.

Perhaps however we have a community of “cats” rather than “dogs” who really don’t want to feel constrained by a central calendar. Perhaps there are offices vying for centrality who struggle to release their sense of control to a central calendar-handler. Perhaps the “big picture” of institutional events is more than most folks wish to juggle, and folks are content to keep abreast of issues/events close to their individual daily experience, not really feeling any immediate need for a central institutional calendar. Perhaps folks prefer to kvetch when things collide or resign themselves to the perceived inevitability of this. Perhaps Mercury really is in permanent retrograde in our institution’s birthchart. These then are the aspects of the system that require attention, and the mere introduction of a good calendar system will not address the disease. It will likely bring the existing disharmonies to the fore, as they have fewer places to hide - and intensify the issue rather than bring it to resolution.

I suspect that tools work well - and often evolve organically - when the lack of an effective tool is the critical step missing in a systems issue. When the missing step is somewhere else, throwing in a tool is doomed to failure. “Build it and they will come” works when the need exists, and the built-thing is the critical missing step. More commonly, the applicable axiom is “necessity is the mother of invention”.

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